MVH Top Hospital for Heart Patients
Miami Valley Hospital keeps its older heart failure patients alive better than 99 percent of U.S. hospitals, the Department of Health and Human Services shows in a new online database.
The first national analysis of mortality rates identified only 1.5 percent of 4,807 hospitals as better or worse than the national rate at keeping patients alive for at least 30 days after admitting them with heart failure.
Miami Valley is one of 38 hospitals better than the national rate for heart failure. Three others are in the Cleveland area. No Ohio hospitals are among the 35 below average.
Nationally, one of every nine heart failure patients older than 65 dies within 30 days of entering the hospital – 11.1 percent – based on Medicare patients hospitalized from July 2005 through June 2006. Statistical adjustments avoided penalizing hospital with sicker patients.
HHS identified only those few hospitals far enough above or below the national rate to create 95 percent certainty that luck wasn’t a factor. That left some superior and inferior hospitals unidentified, it acknowledged.