title: Hospital performance with myocardial reperfusion therapy: are hospitals capable of meeting established guidelines?
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  To determine whether hospitals are capable of delivering myocardial reperfusion therapy in a manner consistent with the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association guidelines. DATA SOURCE AND STUDY SETTING: Data from the National Registry of Myocardial Infarction (NRMI)-2 and NRMI-3 were used. NRMI is an observational study, sponsored by Genentech, conducted from June 1994 through June 2000 and involving 1876 hospitals and 1,310,030 patients across the United States. The protocol calls for collecting data on all patients with a diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction. The setting was community and tertiary hospitals in the United States.
  
  
  METHODS
  This observational study used process capability analysis.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Overall, no hospital was deemed capable of delivering myocardial reperfusion therapy consistent with the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association guidelines. The highest thrombolytic and angioplasty CPUs were 0.44 and 0.52, respectively-well below the traditional value of 1.0 signifying minimum capability. In addition, among the hospitals examined, there remained a wide degree of variability in process capability, ranging from -0.69 to 0.52.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Myocardial reperfusion therapy performance measurement systems relying solely on mean time-to-reperfusion conceal true process performance, thereby obscuring quality improvement opportunities and strategies for improvement. Health care providers, purchasers, regulators, and other organizations interested in measuring and improving health care quality are encouraged to incorporate process capability analysis into their myocardial reperfusion therapy performance measurement and quality management systems.
authors.affiliation: Provena Covenant Medical Center, Urbana, IL, USA. rdsutterjr@yahoo.com
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Sutter
authors.forename: Alan J
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: Tiefenbrunn
authors.forename: Richard G
authors.initials: RG
authors.lastname: Bach
authors.forename: Paul
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Frederick
authors.forename: Michael R
authors.initials: MR
authors.lastname: Hodge
authors.forename: Brian
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Waterman
authors.forename: Patrick S
authors.initials: PS
authors.lastname: Traynor
authors.forename: Wm laiborne
authors.initials: Wl
authors.lastname: Dunagan