Comparing hospital perinatal mortality rates: a quality improvement instrument

This article describes the development of a reliable measurement instrument for the quality of perinatal care. The Hospital Perinatal Mortality Comparison (HPMC) predicts the expected perinatal mortality for individual hospitals, based on the perinatal mortality experienced in a group of similar newborns in a large reference population. Out of the 76 hospitals analyzed in 1990, 2 performed significantly better and 5 performed significantly worse than expected according to the logistic regression model. These results may lead to the identification of opportunities for improving the process of medical care in these hospitals.