Hospital Performance on Percutaneous Coronary Intervention Process and Outcomes Measures

BACKGROUND The Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement recently proposed percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI)-specific process measures. However, information about hospital performance on these measures and the association of PCI process and outcomes measures are not available. METHODS AND RESULTS We linked the National Cardiovascular Data Registry (NCDR) CathPCI Registry with Medicare claims data to assess hospital performance on established PCI process measures (aspirin, thienopyridines, and statins on discharge; door-to-balloon time; and referral to cardiac rehabilitation), newly proposed PCI process measures (documentation of contrast dose, glomerular filtration rate, and PCI indication; appropriate indication for elective PCI; and use of embolic protection device), and a composite of all process measures. We calculated weighted pair-wise correlations between each set of process metrics and performed weighted correlation analyses to assess the association between composite measure performance with corresponding 30-day risk-standardized mortality and readmission rates. We reported the variance in risk-standardized 30-day outcome rates explained by process measures. We analyzed 1 268 860 PCIs from 1331 hospitals. For many process measures, median hospital performance exceeded 90%. We found strong correlations between medication-specific process measures (P<0.01) and weak correlations between hospital performance on the newly proposed and established process measures. The composite process measure explained only 1.3% and 2.0% of the observed variation in mortality and readmission rates, respectively. CONCLUSIONS Hospital performance on many PCI-specific process measures demonstrated little opportunity for improvement and explained only a small percentage of hospital variation in 30-day outcomes. Efforts to measure and improve hospital quality for PCI patients should focus on both process and outcome measures.