This section provides a combined general picture of a hospital's performance on groups of selected medical and surgical cases.

• Section A-1: The group of selected medical cases includes stroke, pneumonia, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and gastrointestinal bleeding.

• Section A-2: The group of selected surgical cases includes lung surgery, lower bowel surgery, spine surgery, vascular surgery, prostate surgery, and hysterectomy.

• Public Health Data

The information should not be used as a measure of how the hospital performed on each individual diagnosis or surgical procedure. In other words, the length of stay for the group of medical cases should not be used to determine how successful a hospital was in treating stroke or pneumonia individually. In the same way, the mortality rate for the group of surgical cases cannot be used to evaluate individual procedures, such as prostate surgery.

The indicators in this report were chosen because they represent some of the most frequent reasons for being admitted to a hospital.

What Is Measured?

The average time a patient needs to be in the hospital (length of stay) and the death rate (mortality rate) are reported here for the selected medical diagnoses and the inpatient (performed on patients admitted to the hospital) surgical cases noted.

Mortality Rates and Quality of Care

Experts in outcomes measurement have strong reservations about using severity-adjusted mortality rates as an absolute gauge of the quality of care provided by a hospital because many other factors must also be considered. Mortality is just one indicator of how a hospital performs.

Average Length of Stay

The average time a patient needs to stay in the hospital is best represented by an expected range. This table shows whether a hospital's average length of stay is within the range that would be expected in a hospital with the same type of patient population. Length of stay is considered an indirect indicator of efficiency. Conclusions about efficiency cannot be based solely on length of stay.