BACKGROUND Public reporting on quality aims to help patients select better hospitals. However, individual quality measures are suboptimal in identifying superior and inferior hospitals based on outcome performance. OBJECTIVE To combine structure, process, and outcome measures into an empirically derived composite quality measure for heart failure (HF), acute myocardial infarction (AMI), and p...

BACKGROUND A single composite measure calculated from individual quality indicators (QIs) is a useful measure of hospital performance and can be justified conceptually even when the indicators are not highly correlated with one another. OBJECTIVE To compare 2 basic approaches for calculating a composite measure: an extension of the most widely-used approach, which weights individual indicator...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The purpose of the present study was to develop and rate performance measures for hospital-based acute ischemic stroke. METHODS A national multidisciplinary panel of 16 individuals (2 stroke specialists, 2 general neurologists, 2 internists, 2 neuroscience nurses, 2 stroke advocacy organization representatives, 1 stroke rehabilitationist, 1 family practitioner, 1 emerge...

OBJECTIVE To develop a performance indicator for acute myocardial infarction which would reliably measure success of treatment and which might provide an alternative to case fatality as an audited outcome. DESIGN A two year audit of all cases of acute myocardial infarction and resuscitated cases of out of hospital cardiac arrest from coronary heart disease in patients under 75 years of age. B...