Does a hospital serving an elderly or at-risk population have a higher mortality ratio?
No. The differences in patient characteristics that vary among hospitals are very much taken into account. In clinical research this is called risk-adjustment, where hospital data are adjusted to remove pre- existing influences. This issue is very important because patients with certain characteristics are less likely to receive some specific treatments or to have positive clinical outcomes than other groups. For example, if a hospital tends to serve a disproportionate number of such patients, it may be unfairly reported as having higher rates of undesirable events, when in fact, these rates may be comparable to another hospital with lower instances that simply serves a different population. Therefore, to improve hospital comparability, appropriate risk-adjustment techniques are used to adjust the data. That said, it is impossible to account for all of the differences in populations. The numbers reported on myhospitalcare.ca – and the sources that inform the site – are as accurate as p
