CABG Readmissions Data Added to CA Outcome Reports

"While we have increasingly more morbidly ill CABG patients, the mortality rates continue to decline. And we attribute this to surgeons and hospitals and others focusing their efforts on quality and really achieving quite good outcomes."

The report lists 119 hospitals in the state where CABG surgery is performed, but for all four measures in this report, only five hospitals are named as "better" while only 12 are listed as "worse" than state average.

For example, for risk-adjusted 30-day mortality, only Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla was listed as having a "better" performance rate, while Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego and West Hills Regional Medical Center of West Hills were listed as being "worse."

That doesn't give consumers or providers much quality information either for choosing care or for making improvements, acknowledges Parker, who said he would like to have at least five categories that can better discriminate and highlight the greater variation between the worst and best hospitals.

Unfortunately, he say, the report's Clinical Advisory Panel "felt this was the best way to present the data," and that this is the way they do it in other states. Parker says there are statistical challenges for spreading the data out in more categories. "I don't think folks across the country have come to a consensus on how you get to more categories."