An index of hospital performance.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a simple index for computing relative hospital performance. An analysis of 33 short-stay general hospitals in New South Wales was used to develop the index. The index is based on patterns of admissions for each hospital, adjusting the hospital's crude death rate for the age distribution of patients treated and variations in the severity of their diagnoses. The index is relatively simple to calculate, but is nevertheless a valid indicator of hospital performance.