MASSDEVICE ON CALL — A new study out of Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston suggests that transparency rules might have negative consequences for very sick heart patients.
The study evaluated the frequency of coronary stent implantation in 116,227 Bay State patients, finding that "outlier" hospitals – pegged for having higher-than-average death rates – were less likely to accept the sickest patients.
Study author Dr. James McCabe stressed that his findings don’t clearly prove doctors shied away from stenting very sick patients. But the study raises the issue of unintended consequences when it comes to transparency rules.
"It really does highlight the idea that [for] all the good that has come from public reporting and process improvement, we’ve traded that for another set of problems," Dr. Duane Pinto, director of the cardiac ICU at Beth Israel, told the Boston Business Journal.
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