Importance: Multiple states publicly report a hospital's risk-adjusted mortality rate for percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) as a quality measure. However, whether reported annual PCI mortality is associated with a hospital's future performance is unclear.
Objective: To evaluate the association between reported risk-adjusted hospital PCI-related mortality and a hospital's future PCI-related mortality.
Design, setting, and participants: This study used data from the New York Percutaneous Intervention Reporting System from January 1, 1998, to December 31, 2016, to assess hospitals that perform PCI.
Exposures: Public-reported, risk-adjusted, 30-day mortality after PCI.
Main outcomes and measures: The primary analysis evaluated the association between a hospital's reported risk-adjusted PCI-related mortality and future PCI-related mortality. The correlation between a hospital's observed to expected (O/E) PCI-related mortality rates each year and future O/E mortality ratios was assessed. Multivariable linear regression was used to examine the association between index year O/E mortality and O/E mortality in subsequent years while adjusting for PCI volume and patient severity.
Results: This study included 67 New York hospitals and 960 hospital-years. Hospitals with low PCI-related mortality (O/E mortality ratio, ≤1) and high mortality (O/E mortality ratio, >1) had inverse associations between their O/E mortality ratio in the index year and the subsequent change in the ratio (hospitals with low mortality, r = -0.45; hospitals with high mortality, r = -0.60). Little of the variation in risk-adjusted mortality was explained by prior performance. An increase in the O/E mortality ratio from 1.0 to 2.0 in the index year was associated with a higher O/E mortality ratio of only 0.15 (95% CI, 0.02-0.27) in the following year.
Conclusions and relevance: At hospitals with high or low PCI-related mortality rates, the rates largely regressed to the mean the following year. A hospital's risk-adjusted mortality rate was poorly associated with its future mortality. The annual hospital PCI-related mortality may not be a reliable factor associated with hospital quality to consider in a practice change or when helping patients select high-quality hospitals.