There is no definitive link showing that hospitals with lower costs and expenditures offer lower quality of care, according to the findings of a new study of Medicare patients conducted by The Commonwealth Fund and published in the Feb. 22 Archives of Internal Medicine.
The study found huge variations in hospitals' costs for treating both conditions, with care for typical congestive heart failure patients ranging from $1,522 to $18,927. Costs for typical pneumonia patients ranged from $1,897 to $15,829, according to the study.
For pneumonia care, high-cost hospitals had lower quality scores compared with the low-cost hospitals. For congestive heart failure, however, hospitals with the highest costs had higher quality scores and lower mortality. Readmission rates were similar among low-cost and high-cost hospitals for pneumonia, while the risk for readmission among congestive heart failure patients was higher at low-cost than at high-cost facilities.
The readmission rates, however, were only slightly higher for congestive heart failure patients among low-cost hospitals, and there was little evidence that overall downstream inpatient costs were higher, according to the study.
Read an abstract of The Commonwealth Fund's study on hospital costs and quality.