As hospital performance on quality measures improves, so too does racial and ethnic equity in performance rates, according to a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine.
Researchers assessed hospital quality measure performance rates for acute myocardial infarction (six measures), heart failure (four measures) and pneumonia (seven measures). They then compared the performance rates among non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic black and Hispanic patients who received care between 2005 and 2010 in U.S. acute-care hospitals.
The study found adjusted performance rates for the 17 quality measures improved by 3.4 to 57.6 percentage points between 2005 and 2010 for white, black and Hispanic adults, according to the report.
In 2005, adjusted performance rates were more than 5 percentage points lower for black patients on three measures and for Hispanic patients on six measures, when compared with adjusted performance rates for white patients.
The performance gap decreased significantly on all nine of these measures between 2005 and 2010. The gap between white patients and black patients decreased between 8.5 and 11.8 percentage points, depending on the performance measure, and between 6.2 and 15.1 percentage points between white patients and Hispanic patients.
Additionally, more equitable care for white patients and minority patients and greater performance improvements among hospitals that disproportionately serve minority patients led to decreasing differences among race or ethnic groups, according to the report.
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