Aims

Thirty-day risk standardized readmission and mortality rates (RSRR, RSMR) are key determinants for hospital performance for cardiovascular conditions such as acute myocardial infarction (AMI) and heart failure (HF). We evaluated whether individual hospitals in the USA perform similarly for HF and AMI over time based on readmission and mortality metrics.

Methods and results

A total of 1950 hospitals in the USA with continuous participation in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) public reporting programme between 2010 and 2016 were identified. Latent mixture modelling was used to define performance trajectory groups. Overall, there were consistent declines in the RSMR (16.1-14.0%) and RSRR (20.3-16.6%) for AMI from 2010 to 2016. For HF, RSRR declined over time (25.1-21.7%), while there was a modest increase in RSMR (11.3-12.0%); parallel findings were observed across performance trajectory groups. The proportion of best performing centres for HF care that were also best performers for AMI care based on the 30-day RSMR and 30-day RSRR metric was 54% and 35%, respectively. Furthermore, the discordance rate between the best and worst performers for both conditions was low (<2% for both 30-day outcomes).

Conclusion

In the USA, despite variation in baseline hospital-level outcomes, hospitals had consistent longitudinal trajectories (worsening or improvement) across conditions and metrics. Hospitals identified as high performing were frequently similar across target conditions and over time, suggesting that performance may be driven by systems of care influencing different disease states in a comparable manner.