Teaching hospitals have lower mortality rates than others
- A Harvard study has found teaching hospitals have lower mortality rates than others
- It examined the difference between hospitals affiliated with medical schools and those that weren’t
- There was a 1.5 percent difference in mortality rates between the two types
- Experts say this translates to 58,000 lives a year that can be saved
Cheyenne Roundtree For Dailymail.com
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In emergency situations, it’s always better to go to a teaching hospital, a Harvard study claims.
It’s long been suggested that centers affiliated with medical schools have better patient care and greater outcomes compared to non-teaching centers.
Now new research from Harvard confirms these findings with concrete evidence that mortality rates are 1.5 percent lower in teaching hospitals.
Teaching hospitals are defined as centers that are affiliated with medical schools to instruct and train upcoming physicians and students in the medical field.
A Harvard study claims teaching hospitals are better with patients than other hospitals, making a 1.5 percent difference in mortality rates
First author Dr Laura Burke, of Beth Israel Medical Center and a Harvard researcher, said when the percentage is applied on a national scale, the difference is profound.
Dr Burke said teaching hospitals only make up six percent of all hospitals in the United States, compared to the 75 percent of non-teaching centers.
She added: ‘When you adjust for patient characteristics (age, sex, Medicaid eligibility, chronic conditions) and hospital characteristics (hospital volume, profit status, urban/rural location, presence of an ICU), the difference is 1.2 percent
‘That gives a number needed to treat of 84, which means that for every 84 patients treated at a major teaching hospital that otherwise would have gone to a non-teaching hospital, one fewer patient dies.
‘That percent translates to around 58,000 lives saved per year. That’s a lot of lives.’
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TOP 10 HOSPITALS IN THE UNITED STATES
1. Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota
2. Cleveland Clinic, Ohio
3. Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts
4. Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, Maryland
5. UCLA Medical Center, Los Angeles, California
6. New York-Presbyterian University Hospital of Columbia and Cornell, New York
7. UCSF Medical Center, San Francisco, California
8. Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago, Illinois
9.Hospitals of the University of Pennsylvania-Penn Presbyterian, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
10. NYU Langone Medical Center, New York
Source: U.S. News World Report
Harvard professor Ashish Jha said: ‘While we know that teaching hospitals fulfill an important mission around teaching and research, we have known less about the quality of care they provide.
‘We find that across a very wide range of medical and surgical conditions, patient receiving care at teaching hospitals have superior outcomes.’
The researchers speculated the reason for the difference is because these types of training hospitals have more experience in dealing with particular or common conditions.
Experts also think it may be because the centers are quicker to adapt to new medical innovations, but they admitted more research needs to be done to confirm the reasons why the mortality rate is lower.
Dr Burke said the next goal is to figure out what exactly makes these differences and find a way to replicate them at non-teaching hospitals.
The study looked at 250 major teaching hospitals, 894 minor teaching hospitals, and 3,339 non-teaching hospitals from 2012 to 2014.
From there, they compiled the data of the 21.5 million hospitalizations of Medicare patients at the 4,483 hospitals and analyzed 30-day mortality rates for 15 common medical conditions.
These conditions included pneumonia, congestive heart failure, and stroke, and for six surgical procedures, including hip replacement, coronary artery bypass grafting, and colectomy.
According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, teaching hospitals account for 38 percent of hospital charity care and 28 percent of all Medicaid hospitalization.
Also, 90 percent of these institutions provide AIDS serviced while only 14 percent of non-teaching hospitals do.
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