Alegent Health Composite Scoring

Participating hospitals agree to publicly report quality-of-care data on CMS's Hospital Compare Web site. Hospitals are presently required to submit data on 25 indicators that focus on clinical processes. Several additional clinical process indicators have been defined by CMS, but are not yet required for public reporting. However, as part of Alegent Health's pledge to provide the highest quality of care, we are voluntarily reporting these five indicators on Alegent.com.

Out of the 30 reported indicators, 21 show how often hospitals provide recommended care known to get the best results for most patients being treated for heart attack (AMI), heart failure (HF) and pneumonia (PN). 

Nine indicators show how often hospitals provide care that is known to reduce complications in surgical patients (SCIP).  Alegent Health has developed a 'Composite Scoring' formula to report the quality of the overall care delivered for these important clinical conditions and their indicators. These composite scores are reported on AlegentHealth.com.

Our methodology for calculating composite scores uses the verified data we report to CMS on 30 quality indicators for heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia, and surgical care.  The success rate for each indicator is as a percentage. View the Alegent Health Composite Score chart This percentage is calculated as the number of patients who actually received a particular treatment (numerator) divided by the number of patients who should have received a particular treatment (denominator). To calculate a composite score for each clinical area, the sum of the numerators for each measure included in the clinical area is divided by the sum of the denominators.

There are treatments for heart attack (AMI), heart failure (HF), pneumonia (PN) and surgery (SCIP) that are known to get the best results for most adult patients. Most hospitals now track their delivery of these treatments as quality indicators. A hospital's quality indicator measurement reflects how often they provide the treatments known to get the best results. The indicators are explained in greater detail in our interactive quality tool .