In Brief: Indiana Healthcare Systems Contribute Mightily To Economy; Northwestern Study Questions Hospital Quality Measure

Indiana's Healthcare Contributes $31.3 Billion To Economy

A new study of Indiana's healthcare systems conclude they contribute $31.3 billion to the state's economy and provide more than 150,000 jobs.

Altogether, hospital and outpatient care-related jobs comprise 4.2% of all of Indiana's public and private employment. About a third of them are concentrated in the central part of the state, particularly in the Indianapolis metropolitan area. Indianapolis is more than triple the size of Fort Wayne, the state's second-largest city.

"Indiana's hospitals and medical care centers reach every corner of our state. Having a baseline look at the industry's health, innovation and economic impact is vital so that we have context around public policy debates and the current transformation of healthcare delivery," said Doug Leonard, president of the Indiana Hospital Association.

The report, entitled "The Economic Impacts of Indiana's Public and Private Hospitals and Outpatient Care Centers," was distributed by BioCrossroads, an Indianapolis-based firm that promotes biotechnology in the Hoosier State.

Northwestern Study Questions Key Hospital Quality Measure

Researchers affiliated with Northwestern Medicine have called into question a prominent post-surgical quality measure, claiming it could give many providers misleading scores.

The measure, clinically known as PSI-12 VTE, rates providers on the prevalence of blood clots that occur in patients after they have undergone surgery.

The study, which focused on the performance results of more than 2,800 hospitals and more than 950,000 related patient discharges that occurred in 2010, suggests that hospitals are rated only on their rates of post-surgical blood clots, and does not take into consideration how proactive they are in preventing such a condition from occurring. The study found that many hospitals that are proactive on VTE prevention have high rates of VTE incidents.

"It is very possible that patients are being misled by this measure when they look at publicly available rankings," said Karl Y. Bilimoria, M.D., director of the Surgical Outcomes and Quality Improvement Center at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and the study's lead author. "Our results indicate that patients who review hospital rankings or quality reports that use this VTE rate measure may actually be guided away from hospitals with higher levels of safety and quality care, toward lower quality hospitals."

The study was published in the most recent edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association.