improvements in short-term acute-MI mortality

Significant improvements in short-term acute-MI mortality in US hospitals

August 18, 2009 | Michael O'Riordan

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New Haven, CT - In the past decade, 30-day mortality rates for patients discharged with acute MI have significantly declined, as has the variation in AMI mortality in hospitals across the US, a new study has shown [1]. Overall, the 30-day mortality rates declined from 18.8% in 1995 to 15.8% in 2006, an approximate one-sixth reduction in short-term mortality over the 12-year study period, report investigators.

"A challenge was really set down about a decade ago, where we really needed to achieve a better system and wanted to shift the entire spectrum of performance toward better care," said lead investigator Dr Harlan Krumholz (Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT). "That meant that we weren't really looking at the outliers but saying that the status quo is not acceptable. This paper is showing the realization of what we hoped to accomplish, which is a shift in the distribution of mortality, and the variation shrinking. We've improved performance and shrunk some of that variation between hospitals."/.../