Background: Hospitals with high mortality and readmission rates for patients with heart failure (HF) might also perform poorly in other quality concepts. We sought to evaluate the association between hospital performance on mortality and readmission with hospital performance rates of safety adverse events.
Methods: This cross-sectional study linked the 2009 to 2019 patient-level adverse events data from the Medicare Patient Safety Monitoring System, a randomly selected medical records-abstracted patient safety database, to the 2005 to 2016 hospital-level HF-specific 30-day all-cause mortality and readmissions data from the United States Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Hospitals were classified to one of 3 performance categories based on their risk-standardized 30-day all-cause mortality and readmission rates: better (both in <25th percentile), worse (both >75th percentile), and average (otherwise). Our main outcome was the occurrence (yes/no) of one or more adverse events during hospitalization. A mixed-effect model was fit to assess the relationship between a patient's risk of having adverse events and hospital performance categories, adjusted for patient and hospital characteristics.
Results: The study included 39 597 patients with HF from 3108 hospitals, of which 252 hospitals (8.1%) and 215 (6.9%) were in the better and worse categories, respectively. The rate of patients with one or more adverse events during a hospitalization was 12.5% (95% CI, 12.1-12.8). Compared with patients admitted to better hospitals, patients admitted to worse hospitals had a higher risk of one or more hospital-acquired adverse events (adjusted risk ratio, 1.24 [95% CI, 1.06-1.44]).
Conclusions: Patients admitted with HF to hospitals with high 30-day all-cause mortality and readmission rates had a higher risk of in-hospital adverse events. There may be common quality issues among these 3 measure concepts in these hospitals that produce poor performance for patients with HF.
Keywords: heart failure; hospitalization; mortality rate; readmission rates.