Cardiovascular disease kills more Americans than any other illness and accounts for some 300,000 Medicare hospitalizations every year. The federal government has taken measures to help solve what is a serious national problem. The National Acute Myocardial Infarction Project was launched to strengthen appropriate care processes to improve patient outcomes. Accordingly, in 1992, the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) initiated the Cooperative Cardiovascular Project to improve the quality of care for Medicare heart disease patients, and data from the Project have suggested that there is ample room for improvement.

The aim of Solucient’s study is to guide that improvement for the care of all cardiovascular patients. Although we limited our study to 412 hospitals with high volumes of cardiac patients, our findings have implications that reach far beyond this subset. The benchmarks established by this study are intended to serve as a model for improvement for all hospitals that provide cardiac care.

• The most striking finding in this year’s study is the wide gap in mortality indices between the benchmark facilities and their peers.
• Benchmark hospitals had lower rates of risk-adjusted complications than their peer facilities.
• Benchmarks hospitals achieved slightly lower costs and shorter lengths of stay than those in the peer group.