[High hospital standardized mortality ratio does not always indicate low quality].

Hospital standardized mortality ratio (HSMR) is increasingly used to assess quality of care. At Frederiksberg Hospital HSMR increased significantly during the first and second quarter in 2012. We therefore reviewed records of all deceased, including patients deceased during the comparative period in 2011 (n = 413).

[Analysis of quality data based on national clinical databases].

There is little agreement on the philosophy of measuring clinical quality in health care. How data should be analyzed and transformed to healthcare information is an ongoing discussion. To accept a difference in quality between health departments as a real difference, one should consider to which extent the selection of patients, random variation, confounding and inconsistency may have influenced results.