Association between a hospital's quality performance for in-hospital cardiac arrest and common medical conditions.

BACKGROUND

Public reporting on hospital quality has been widely adopted for common medical conditions. Adding a measure of inpatient survival after cardiac arrest is being considered. It is unknown whether this measure would be redundant, given evidence that hospital organization and culture can have hospital-wide effects on quality. Therefore, we sought to evaluate the correlation between inpatient survival after cardiac arrest and 30-day risk-standardized mortality rates for common medical conditions.

METHODS AND RESULTS

Using data between 2007 and 2010 from a national in-hospital cardiac arrest registry, we calculated risk-standardized in-hospital survival rates for cardiac arrest at each hospital. We obtained risk-standardized 30-day mortality rates for acute myocardial infarction, heart failure, and pneumonia from Hospital Compare for the same period. The relationship between a hospital's performance on cardiac arrest and these other medical conditions was assessed using weighted Pearson correlation coefficients. Among 26 270 patients with in-hospital cardiac arrest at 130 hospitals, survival rates varied across hospitals, with a median risk-standardized hospital survival rate of 22.1% and an interquartile range of 19.7% to 24.2%. There were no significant correlations between a hospital's outcomes for its cardiac arrest patients and its patients admitted for acute myocardial infarction (correlation, -0.12; P=0.16), heart failure (correlation, -0.05; P=0.57), or pneumonia (correlation, -0.15; P=0.10).

CONCLUSIONS

Hospitals that performed better on publicly reported outcomes for 3 common medical conditions did not necessarily have better cardiac arrest survival rates. Public reporting on cardiac arrest outcomes could provide new information about hospital quality.