BETHLEHEM, Pa. — A new progress report for Pennsylvania hospitals systems shows a significant increase in hospital mortality rates across the state from 2017 to 2022.
The report, including the Lehigh Valley’s two major systems, is released each year by the Pennsylvania Health Care Coalition on Cost Containment, or PHC4.
The latest report shows data from 2022.
PHC4 Deputy Executive Director Heather Nairn said the report also shows readmission rates have decreased across 10 different conditions.
Readmission is counted when a patient has to go back to the hospital within 30 days for the same condition.
Nairn said the report is broken down by location and 16 health condition.
St. Luke's readmission rates up
In most cases, Lehigh Valley Health Network and St. Luke’s University Health Network scored the same or had lower than expected mortality and readmission rates than years past, according to the report.
The report did show a few instances at both systems when the readmission rate went up. It showed two instances where the mortality rate increased at one network.
Analysis of the report showed that the mortality rate for abnormal heartbeat patients at St. Luke’s Anderson campus was higher than expected in 2022.
It also showed that the mortality rate for respiratory failure patients was higher than expected at St. Luke’s Bethlehem campus.
Overall, St. Luke’s had higher instances of readmission than LVHN.
Both had a couple instances of lower-than-expected mortality and readmission rates among the different conditions and locations.
Number of cases for period of report
The report shows the total number of cases for the time period of the report, the mortality rate across the state, readmission rate across the state and the average hospital charge that went out to either the patient or the insurance company.
“Meaning people's health outcomes when they go to the hospital and are admitted for certain conditions, have certain types of surgeries, cancer surgeries,” Nairn said.
PHC4 is a nonpartisan group focused on helping to share transparent information around health care costs and outcomes.
Its flagship report is the annual Hospital Performance Report, which comes out at the end of the year showing how hospitals fared the year before.
"We evaluate all hospitals across the state of Pennsylvania for a number of different conditions."Heather Nairn, deputy executive director, Pennsylvania Health Care Coalition on Cost Containment
"We evaluate all hospitals across the state of Pennsylvania for a number of different conditions and then we dive deeper into that to look at the mortality and the readmission rate by those conditions for each individual hospital across this Pennsylvania," Nairn said.
PHC4 has also published reports on opioid use and admissions for opioid use, maternal morbidity, neonatal abstinence syndrome, and cancer surgeries performed.
All can be found on the new website PHC4.org.
