| Quality | |
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| One issue that always surfaces in looking at hospital efficiency is What about quality?. Because of the limitations of the available data, direct quality measures of hospital inpatient admissions are currently not available from administrative records. However, reviewing the hospitals that fall within our benchmark ranges in the various categories can shed some light on this issue. In general, well-known and well-respected hospitals are strongly represented in our benchmarks, implying that the benchmarks are not drawn from small, unknown institutions of questionable quality. Furthermore, the benchmarks are not all from California hospitals. As an example, with the 2000 Medicare data an analysis was done of the 50 hospitals that most frequently fell within our benchmark LOS levels. The analysis required a minimum of 20 admissions within each APR-DRG**/severity category to be considered. The hospitals most frequently represented are summarized below: | |
| | University of Virginia #1. |
| | Cleveland Clinic #2. |
| | Stanford Health Services #6. |
| | Beth Israel/Deaconess, Boston as #7. |
| | University of North Carolina, University of Pittsburgh, University of Michigan in top 15. |
| | St. Marys, Rochester MN, UCLA, Loma Linda, UC Davis, University of Massachusetts (Central MA), University Hospital Cleveland in top 30. |
| | Vanderbilt, University of Alabama, Ohio State, Duke in top 50. |
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Geographically, 21 different states are represented in the top 50 hospitals. |
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** 3M All Patient Refined Diagnostic Related Groups. All copyrights in and to APR-DRGs are owned by 3M. All rights reserved.