How can a hospital or system accurately calculate how many lives it has saved?
Unfortunately, hospitals or systems will have trouble accurately counting their own lives saved using the same approach that the Campaign is using for counting national lives saved (described above). There are two major confounders to calculating lives saved at the hospital or system level using this approach: 1. This particular statistic requires a very large number of patients before it can reach a reasonable level of statistical significance, meaning even very large hospitals are vulnerable to situations in which random fluctuations can overwhelm actual changes in the observed results. 2. Patient mortality risk changes over time might be dramatic, and these changes need to be accounted for in the lives saved calculation; most hospitals don’t have immediate access to a mortality risk-adjustment that quantifies these changes. However, in the spirit of transparency, even though the problems described above limit the power of the calculation, IHI has created a tool which allows hospital
