While the United States still lags other developed countries in overall health, the quality of care provided in American hospitals has been steadily improving over the last seven years. These results were announced in a new report published by the Joint Commission, an independent, not-for-profit organization that accredits and certifies more than 17,000 healthcare organizations and programs in the U.S.

The report is based on data compiled from 3,000 hospitals between 2002 and 2009. It tracks 31 quality measures that relate mainly to heart attacks, heart failures, pneumonia, and surgical conditions. For example, over the seven year period, quality of care has significantly improved for heart attacks, heart failure, and pneumonia patients. Based on composite quality scores calculated for each condition:

• The 2008 heart attack care score was 96.7%, up from 86.9% in 2002
• The 2008 heart failure care score was 91.6%, up from 59.7% in 2002
• The 2008 pneumonia care score was 92.9% , up from 72.3% in 2002

These improvements are mainly due to hospitals more consistently providing care that is based on the latest scientific evidence, rather than on the individual preference of doctors and nurses.

On surgical care performance measures, as well as on additional individual heart attack and pneumonia care measures, there have also been some significant improvements:

• For heart attack patients, smoking cessation advice improved from 66.6% in 2002 to 98.9% in 2008
• For heart failure patients, smoking cessation advice improved from 42.2% in 2002, to 97.6% in 2008
• For pneumonia patients, smoking cessation advice improved from 37.2% in 2002 to 96.0% in 2008
• For surgical patients, stopping antibiotics within 24 hours improved from 73.5% in 2005, to 90.5% in 2008

For other measures that were being tracked for the first time, hospital performance care for childhood asthma was also excellent as scores of 99.8% on providing relievers and 99.1% on providing systematic corticosteroids were observed.

The only piece of bad news comes from care related to fibrinolytic therapy and antibiotic use in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). Fibrinolytic therapy is the use of infusions of agents to destroy or dissolve blood clots in blood vessels. Only a 52.4% performance score was obtained on providing fibrinolytic therapy within 30 minutes of arrival to heart attack patients and only a 60.3% performance score was obtained on providing antibiotics to ICU patients with pneumonia within 24 hours of arrival.

According to the president of The Joint Commission, “in addition to saving lives and improving health, improved quality reduces health care costs by eliminating preventable complications,” and “quality improvement is an important aspect of the ongoing reform effort to make health care accessible to more Americans and ‘bend the curve’ on increasing costs. By eliminating the preventable complications that today drive up the cost of care, we would easily save the many billions of dollars lawmakers are struggling so hard to locate.”