Key Points:
- Evaluating a hospital’s performance against its peers by comparing hospital quality metrics is important, but identifying appropriate peers can be complex.
- Clustering hospitals based on their similarity across multiple characteristics — such as inpatient admission volume and hospital type — can help identify more comparable peers.
- The Hospital Quality Institute’s (HQI’s) Hospital Similarity Clusters allow for comparisons and provide insights, as demonstrated in a recent article on sepsis mortality rates.
For more details on the underlying methodology and to see the hospital designations by cluster, read the full analysis paper.