Objective To assess associations between maternal child marriage (marriage before age 18) and morbidity and mortality of infants and children under 5 in India.

Sharing lessons from high-performing hospitals facilitates quality improvement. High-performing hospitals have usually been identified using a small number of performance measures. The objective was to analyze how well 1,006 hospitals performed across a broader range of measures. Five measures were developed from publicly available data: adherence to processes of care, 30-day readmission rates, in-hospital mortality, efficiency, and patient satisfaction. For a subset of hospitals, the authors included two survey-based assessments of patient care quality, one by chief quality officers and one by frontline clinicians. In general, there was little correlation among the publicly available measures (r ≤ .10), though there was notable correlation between objective measures and survey-based measures (r = .23). Hospitals that performed well on a composite measure calculated from the publicly available measures were often not in the top quintile on most individual measures. This highlights the challenge in identifying high-performing hospitals to learn organizational-level best practices.

BackgroundVenous thromboembolism is a common, fatal, and costly injury which complicates major surgery in older adults. The American College of Chest Physicians recommends high potency prophylaxis regimens for individuals undergoing total hip or knee replacement (THR or TKR), but surgeons are reluctant to prescribe them due to fear of excess bleeding. Identifying a high risk cohort such as older adults with comorbidities and co-occurring comorbidities who might benefit most from high potency prophylaxis would improve how we currently perform preoperative assessment.MethodsUsing the Nationwide Inpatient Sample, we identified older adults who underwent THR or TKR in the U.S. between 2003 and 2006. Our outcome was VTE, including any pulmonary embolus or deep venous thrombosis. We performed multivariate logistic regression analyses to assess the effects of comorbidities on VTE occurrence. Comorbidities under consideration included coronary artery disease, congestive heart failure (CHF), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), diabetes, and cerebrovascular disease. We also examined the impact of co-occurring comorbidities on VTE rates.ResultsCHF increased odds of VTE in both the THR cohort (OR = 3.08 95% CI 2.05-4.65) and TKR cohort (OR = 2.47 95% CI 1.95-3.14). COPD led to a 50% increase in odds in the TKR cohort (OR = 1.49 95% CI 1.31-1.70). The data did not support synergistic effect of co-occurring comorbidities with respect to VTE occurrence.ConclusionsOlder adults with CHF undergoing THR or TKR and with COPD undergoing TKR are at increased risk of VTE. If confirmed in other datasets, these older adults may benefit from higher potency prophylaxis.

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Variation across hospitals in the PTH index, the strong relationship between beds and the PTH, and the lack of relationship between severity and the PTH suggest the importance of policies that limit bed growth of high PTH hospitals and create incentives for high PTH hospitals to reduce hospitalizations.

Among those hospitalized with CHD, appropriateness rates for two cardiac procedures are higher in areas with higher use rates.

Sustaining ongoing relationships with patients is a strategic, clinically relevant goal of health care systems. This study develops and tests a conceptual model that aims to account for the influence of organization design, perceptions of quality of patient care, and other patient-level factors on the extent to which patients sustain reliance on a health care system. We use a longitudinal survey design and structural equation modeling to predict increases or decreases in patient reliance on the Department of Veterans Affairs health care system across a 4-year period for Veterans with Parkinson's Disease. Our findings show that specialized and integrated clinical practices have a positive association with the quality of patient care. Health care systems may be able to foster long-term relations with patients and improve service quality by allocating resources to form integrated, specialized, disease-specific centers of care designed for patients with chronic illnesses.

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