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Katherine L. Kahn, MD; Robert H. Brook, MD, ScD; Emmett Keeler, PhD
RAND Santa Monica, Calif

JAMA. 1996;276(13):1033.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.

—The relative importance of the process of care as compared with the outcome of care, as a measure of quality, has been debated for many years. It has been raised again in an important study about the value of admission characteristics in predicting short-term mortality from acute myocardial infarction (MI) in elderly patients.¹ Six years ago, we, in collaboration with 5 professional review organizations, studied this issue for patients with acute MI, congestive heart failure, pneumonia, stroke, and hip fracture, using a nationally representative sample.² After collecting 57 clinically detailed variables to study sickness at admission or severity of illness for patients hospitalized with acute MI, we were able to explain 22% of the variance in death rates 30 days after admission using only 16 of these variables. We concluded that a small set of clinical variables could explain a substantial amount of variance in . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Footnotes
Edited by Margaret A. Winker, MD, Senior Editor, and Phil B. Fontanarosa, MD, Senior Editor.

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