[Use of hospital mortality rates following myocardial revascularization surgery to monitor hospital care].

Brazilian hospitals performing coronary artery by-pass graft surgery (CABG) from 1996 to 1998 and covered by the Ministry of Health were ranked according to their risk-adjusted hospital mortality rates. Seventy-six hospitals that performed more than 150 CABGs (total of 38,962 surgical interventions) were classified as low or high outliers according to the ratio between observed and expected hospital mortality rates. Overall hospital mortality rate was 7.20%. The rate was 3.48% among patients treated in the low outliers and 13.96% among the high outliers. The methodology was useful for discriminating Brazilian hospitals according to their post-CABG mortality rates and may be a useful tool for identifying hospitals with possible quality-of-care problems.