risk-adjusted death rate

The method identifies precise patient risk factors that can lead to calculation of a hospital risk-adjusted death rate based on a patient's condition.

As a group, the hospitals in the top 5 percent had a risk-adjusted death rate 27 percent below that of other hospitals.

Columbia-Presbyterian and Westchester Medical Center were the only two hospitals in the state that had risk-adjusted death rates that were significantly higher than the statewide rate.

The risk-adjusted death rate that the state uses is what the hospital's or surgeon's death rate would have been if all patients were identical, and if the hospitals' and surgeons' performances were identical throughout the state.

The state uses several statistical measures and adjusts the overall statistics to account for about 45 risk factors - like differences in the severity of illness among patients, the state of patients' health before the operation, the skill of the operating team and general postoperative care after the surgery - to arrive at risk-adjusted death rates for all the hospitals.