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Elizabeth E. Drye, MD, SM; Jersey Chen, MD, MPH

Arch Intern Med. 2008;168(12):1249-1251.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

An unsolved question in health care quality measurement is how to assess the performance of hospitals and physicians with small volumes of patients.¹ Evaluating hospitals with limited information is akin to judging a baseball player's hitting performance based on only a few games. Major League Baseball publishes all players' batting averages,² but it considers only players with at least 502 plate appearances over a season when ranking top individual batting performances.³ Unlike most baseball players, many hospitals with small volumes may never accumulate enough data to support an accurate evaluation. What should we do?

CHALLENGES OF ASSESSING HOSPITAL PERFORMANCE

In this issue of the Archives, O’Brien et al⁴ illustrate the challenges of assessing hospital performance when case volumes are small. They examine the relationship between hospital performance and sample size using the process-of-care measures of quality for acute myocardial infarction (AMI) published by the Centers . . . [Full Text of this Article]

HOW SHOULD WE PROCEED?

AUTHOR INFORMATION


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