According to the latest study, the gap between the best and worst performing hospitals in the United States has widened by as much as 5 percent since last year.
The new report, Health Grade's Hospital Quality in America, has found that treatment outcomes at U.S. hospitals vary widely, and are dependent on which state, city or individual hospital provides the care.
It seems patients have a 69 percent lower risk of dying at "5-star" hospitals compared with "1-star" institutions, even though overall hospital death rates have dropped by almost 8 percent.
Health Grades is an independent health care ratings group and this latest annual report is their ninth.
The report based their assessment of the quality of care at more than 5,000 hospitals by analyzing 40.6 million Medicare hospital records from 2003 through 2005.
It uses a star rating system that tells people whether a particular hospital's performance has been "best" (5-star), "as expected" (3-star), or "poor" (1-star) on a particular procedure or diagnosis across 28 categories.
The ratings are based on patient outcomes, specifically, the risk of dying, or having serious complications.
Dr. Samantha Collier, Vice President of medical affairs at Health Grades, says across 28 conditions, such as heart failure and heart attack, and procedures, such as bypass surgery, and knee replacement, there is a large variation between hospitals and some of the differences can equate to as much as 90 percent.
The researchers estimate that were all hospitals 5-star rated, the lives of 302,403 Medicare patients could have been saved from 2003 through 2005.
The researchers also found that 50 percent of preventable deaths were linked to just four diagnoses: heart failure, community-acquired pneumonia, sepsis (blood infection) and respiratory failure.