The Hospital Manager’s Association
Top Secret – Eyes Only
The Hospital Manager’s Guide to Massaging HSMRs
Members will be aggrieved to hear that the Doctor Foster Intelligence Unit and its lottery hospital standardised mortality ratios (HSMRs) are here to stay, despite several recent papers showing the methodology to be unsound.
Members will appreciate that they supply the raw data used by Dr Foster, thus providing opportunities to ‘cook’ the figures before they are passed to Dr Foster. The Association does not condone directly tampering with the data; however, faced with the intractable use of flawed statistics, the Association does believe members are entitled to ‘game’ the system to their advantage.