A cohort research involving greater than 2.5 million older sufferers with sepsis discovered that admission to safety-net hospitals was related to increased in-hospital mortality than non–safety-net hospitals, researchers reported late final week in JAMA Community Open.
The authors of the research say the findings could also be tied to the higher use of hospice at non–safety-net hospitals, which shifts attribution of dying from the index hospitalization to hospice care.
The research, led by researchers at Boston College (BU) Medical College and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Heart, examined medical document of Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries aged 66 years and older who have been admitted with sepsis to an intensive care unit from January 2011 to December 2019. Co-primary outcomes included in-hospital mortality and 30-day mortality.
No distinction in 30-day mortality
Greater than 2.5 million sufferers with sepsis (imply age, 78.8 years; 51.9% feminine; 83.8% White) have been admitted to 666 safety-net hospitals and 1,924 non–safety-net hospitals throughout the research interval. Admission to safety-net hospitals was related to increased in-hospital mortality (odds ratio [OR], 1.09; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.06 to 1.13) however not 30-day mortality (OR, 1.01; 95% CI, 0.99 to 1.04), which the authors say is a much less biased measure of short-term mortality.
Admission to safety-net hospitals was additionally related to decrease do-not-resuscitate charges (OR, 0.86; 95% CI, 0.81 to 0.91), palliative care supply charges (OR, 0.66; 95% CI, 0.60 to 0.73), and hospice discharge (OR, 0.82; 95% CI, 0.78 to 0.87) however not with discharge to postacute services (OR, 0.98; 95% CI, 0.95 to 1.01).
The authors say the findings are vital as a result of whereas the variations between safety-net and non–safety-net hospitals have been small, they have been sufficient to have an effect on hospital rankings. New York is among the many states that makes use of in-hospital mortality to judge how hospitals carry out on sepsis high quality measures.
“Present or future state and federal high quality measures that use in-hospital mortality as a high quality metric could unfairly penalize safety-net hospitals,” corresponding creator Anica Legislation, MD, assistant professor of medication at BU College of Medication, mentioned in a press launch.
Legislation and her colleagues say their findings can be utilized to information number of higher final result measures for publicly reported high quality benchmarks.
