|  What are the Recommended Care (Process of Care) Measures?
 Recommended Care (Process of Care) Measures refer to the actions taken to care for a patient. Using the correct treatment, processes or actions, such as diagnosing, treating, or educating patients, are likely to lead to better outcomes or recoveries. Based on years of experience, the federal government’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Joint Commission have developed these standards to treat certain conditions. These recommended treatments are sometimes referred to as "best practices." This web site includes a set of inpatient and outpatient measures.
DOH has adopted some of these national standards to measure the quality of performance in New Jersey hospitals. Examples of inpatient recommended care (process of care) measures are:
- a heart patient receiving with an aspirin within 24 hours before or after arrival and
- a heart patient being perscribed an aspirin at discharge.
These standards can be found on the links provided below, the NJ 2011 Hospital Performance Report and the 2011 Technical Report on Recommended Care.
The information on this web site is designed to help you choose a hospital and make other decisions about your health care. The data, which is based on 2010, shows how each hospital treats eligible patients 18 years or older with a heart attack, pneumonia, heart failure, and patients having surgery. Higher scores are better.
What do the hospital scores mean?
The scores show how well hospitals are providing care for eligible heart attack, pneumonia, heart failure patients and preventing infections for surgical patients. By looking at the number of times a hospital has provided the recommended care, you can determine how well a hospital is providing quality of care.
The number is then converted into a percentage by dividing the total number of eligible patients by the total number of patients that received the correct care. For example, an 85% rate means that the hospital provided the recommended care for 85 out of 100 of the eligible patients. The goal for each measure is 100%, meaning all patients receive the best care.
All recommended care tables include the Top 10% and Top 50% performers for each measure. These scores help determine which hospitals are among the top 10% and 50% NJ hospitals in the specific measure. If your hospital has a score that is equal to or greater than the score displayed at the top of the table, it is among the top 10% or 50% performers in NJ on the specific measure.
The data excludes those patients who should not receive the treatments due to their specific conditions (contraindications). Please note that small differences in hospital scores do not indicate real differences in hospital quality.
Which hospitals are included?
All New Jersey general acute care hospitals are included.
How is the information collected and verified?
The information is collected by hospitals from patient medical records. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) randomly selects a sample of hospitals and reviews a sample of their data for accuracy. All New Jersey hospitals passed this review. To learn more about the data collection methods and the CMS audit process, see the technical report.
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| Conditions |
National Importance |
Treatments Covered in this Report |
Heart Attack or Acute
Myocardial Infarction
(AMI) |
There are 785,000 new heart attacks and 470,000 recurrent heart attacks annually, leading to 133,000 deaths. |
|
| Pneumonia |
With 1.2 million discharges from hospitals, pneumonia is the second most common healthcare-associated infection in hospitals, and is a major cause of death (approximately 55,000 annually). |
|
| Surgical Care |
Infections: Occur at an estimated 500,000 per year and account for approximately 17% of all healthcare-associated infections per year, the second most common type of medical error occurring in hospitalized patients.
Cardiac Complications: Occur in 2-5% of patients having non-cardiac surgery and 34% of patients having vascular surgery.
Blood Clots: Occur in 25% of all major surgical procedures and result in over 50,000 deaths annually; are the most common preventable cause of hospital deaths. |
|
| Heart Failure |
Around 5.8 million people in the US have heart failure; about 670,000 people are newly diagnosed annually. About one in five people die within one year from diagnosis. Heart failure contributed to approximately 283,000 annual deaths. |
|
 Basic Facts on Treating Heart Attacks
Basic Facts on Treating Pneumonia
Basic Facts on Surgical Care Improvement
Basic Facts on Treating Heart Failure
Using the Information on this Website
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