PEORIA -- Forget all the lavish advertising and public relations promoting Peoria's hospitals. They're all average, according to the latest information from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The government has released information on how US hospitals handle that most common and dreaded event -- heart attacks. More specifically it looks at the death rates from heart failure and heart attack after the victim turns to the hospital.
The information is listed on the HHS's clunky website where you can check out the various measures for treating a heart attack as well as death rates from heart attack and heart failure.
Best bet to navigate the site: type in your city for a list of hospitals within say 50 miles, to get the exact names of the hospitals you want. (For example, OSF Saint Francis Medical Center is not listed that way. Instead it's Saint Francis Medical Center.)
The site covers 188 Illinois hospitals under the category 'heart failure.' It looks at the 30-day survival rate, and finds one -- Bromenn in Bloomington -- as one of only 35 in the US that ranks below average. The rest in the Peoria area are average.
A Bromenn official told the Chicago Tribune he was "perplexed" by the results, since the hospital has above average care on other heart measures. It rated average on the 30-day survival rate for heart attack, as did the other hospitals.
Two Chicago hospitals, Northwestern Memorial and Loyola University Medical Center, Maywood, were the only Illinois hospitals rated above average for heart failure survival
The Tribune's in-depth article reveals that only a few percentage points separate the above average from the below average.
True to form, the HHS site does not reveal exact figures, and lumps the hospitals only in the three categories, above, below and average.
A patient contemplating heart surgery or treatment who has a choice of hospitals might well ask for those exact figures, however, and wonder about a hospital that won't reveal them.
It also pays to remember that medical figures like these rely on complex statistics -- which in turn usually rely on the famous 'bell curve' that controls statistical results. If you're at an end of that curve, the usual treatment may not work for you or may produce better than average results.
--Elaine Hopkins
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