30-day hospital mortality measures

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and its Hospital Quality Alliance (HQA) partners began publicly reporting risk-adjusted, 30-day mortality rates on the Hospital Compare website in June 2007. The rationale for reporting mortality measures is to illustrate variation in patient outcomes across the country and to create a visible incentive for hospitals to improve patient short-term survival.

Population and data source

The rates include data for all Medicare patients with principal hospital discharge diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction (AMI), heart failure (HF), or pneumonia (PN) from all acute care and critical access hospitals in the nation. CMS will calculate the 30-day measures using Medicare administrative claims data that hospitals already submit; hospitals will not need to submit new or additional information to CMS or to the QIO Clinical Data Warehouse.

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