Joe Paduda of Managed Care Matters did some research and found that a cardiology department in Elyria, Ohio received an award for quality (“Quality means exactly what?“). Why is this significant? As I noted on Saturday, this same department performed four times as many angioplasties as the rest of the country. Mr. Paduda sums up the problems with quality measurement well:
“…the center had “the lowest complication rate”. That could be because the cardiologists are really great. Or it could be because they perform a lot of procedures on low risk patients , patients that are likely to require relatively short lengths of stay and experience low complication rates.”