Thirty-day mortality rate for regional facilities

For several years now the Dallas-Fort Worth Hospital Council Foundation (DFWHC Foundation) has been able to replicate the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) 30-day, all-cause readmission measures for congestive heart failure, myocardial infarction (AMI) and pneumonia (PN). What has been missing is information on patients who have expired within the 30-day period without being readmitted to the hospital. Data needed to do a 30-day mortality rate can be found in the CMS Death Master File. This year, the DFWHC Foundation is working on loading the data into its readmissions business intelligence tool to give regional facilities yet another opportunity to measure performance. Beyond the three CMS conditions, we would be able to do a 30-day mortality rate on a number of other conditions. This opens up the possibility for additional investigation using DFWHC Foundation data to identify research populations.