Researchers from Imperial College London and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine compared the widely used metric of hospital standardized mortality ratios with the percentage of deaths in U.K. hospitals that medical reviewers classified as having “at least a 50 percent probability of avoidability.”
The U.K. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality defines HSMR as the ratio of the actual number of acute in-hospital deaths to the expected number of in-hospital deaths, for conditions accounting for about 80 percent of inpatient mortality.
The researchers also ran preventable death data against a commonly-used U.K. metric comparable to HSMR, the Summary Hospital-Level Mortality Indicator.
The authors determined there was no association between the use of HSMRs and the number of deaths ruled as avoidable. They concluded that both the HSMR and SHMI metrics should not be used as a benchmark for a hospital’s quality of care.
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