Reading Part B12

B12. What does this information tell us about?

Extract from Blog

There's an exceedingly simple way to get better health care: Choose a better hospital. A recent study shows that many patients have already done so, driving up the market shares of higher-quality hospitals. A great deal of the decrease in deaths from heart attacks over the past two decades can be attributed to specific medical technologies like stents and drugs that break open arterial blood clots. But a study by health economists at Harvard, M.I.T., Columbia and the University of Chicago showed that heart attack survival gains from patients selecting better hospitals were significant, about half as large as those from breakthrough technologies. That's a big improvement for nothing more than driving a bit farther to a higher quality hospital. Because more Medicare patients went to higher-quality hospitals for heart attacks between 1996 and 2008, overall chances of survival increased by one percentage point, according to the study. To receive care at a hospital with a one-percentage point gain in survival rate or a one-percentage-point decrease in readmission rate, a heart attack patient travelled 1.8 or 1.1 miles farther, respectively. The investigators also found survival gains for heart failure and pneumonia, but with far less of a difference, about 0.21 and 0.10 percentage points.