His chances are lesser at the Danville Regional Medical Center in Virginia where the death rate for heart attack is 19.6 percent and 15.5 percent for heart failure.
This information is not based on whispered accounts or urban legends, but online information as medical centers open up about their mortality and morbidity data.
The daily USA Today placed on its website the list of U.S. hospitals with the rates of deaths for heart attacks, heart failures and pneumonia for the past two years, which are considered benchmarks of a hospitals' total performance.
Among the pioneers in the public openness of medical survival rates were the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which released a comparison of death rates for heart attacks and heart failures in 2007 for U.S. hospitals. The center released its information through USA Today.
Comparison with national average showed that few medical institutions received better or worse rates than the median.
On Wednesday, the center announced it included pneumonia mortality measures in its Hospital Compare report. CMS Acting Administrator Kerry Weems, in a statement, said, "With these new enhancements, consumers and health care providers will be able to look at individual hospital mortality scores. We hope that this new information will cement the Web site's role as a key driver in improving the quality and reliability of care in the nation's hospitals."
