of care for heart patients
In a large national study, Yale researchers found that elderly black patients hospitalized for heart failure received similar quality of care as white patients and had higher survival rates than whites up to one year afterwards.
"Our findings demonstrate that there are no racial differences in the quality of health care provided to Medicare beneficiaries hospitalized for heart failure," says Dr. Harlan Krumholz, professor of medicine at the School of Medicine and director of the Yale-New Haven Hospital Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation. He is senior author of the study, which was published in the May 21 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Using data from the National Heart Care/National Heart Failure Project, the team evaluated 29,732 patients hospitalized for heart failure. They found that black patients had a lower mortality rate than white patients, both 30 days after admission (6.3% versus 10.7%) and one year afterward (31.5% versus 40.1%). Black patients were more likely to be re-hospitalized than white patients (68.2% versus 63.0%), although it is unclear if this difference was due to post-discharge care or other factors.
While other studies of racial differences in health care and outcomes have focused on differences in the treatments used, this study examined whether differences in treatment reflect poorer quality care.
According to the study's first author, Saif Rathore, lecturer in the Department of Internal Medicine, "Rather than simply assuming disparities exist, our findings underscore the need to study patterns of care for individual clinical conditions in order to understand why there are disparities for some conditions and in some populations, but not others."
Study authors include Rathore, Krumholz, JoAnne Foody, assistant professor of medicine at Yale; Yongfei Wang, statistical analyst; Grace Smith, medical student; Jeph Herrin, statistical analyst; Frederick Masoudi, researcher at Denver Health Medical Center; Pamela Wolfe, statistical analyst at the Colorado Foundation for Medical Care; Edward Havranek, researcher at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center; and Diana Ordin, researcher at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
-- By Karen Peart
T H I S
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