Ann P. Bartel

This article is forthcoming at Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World. We gratefully acknowledge funding for this research from Pivotal Ventures, Washington Center for Equitable Growth, Russell Sage Foundation, and Ford Foundation, and support from the Columbia Population Research Center which is funded by the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) through grant P2CHD058486.

We thank Junying Fang and Jett Pettus for excellent research assistance. We thank participants at APPAM and AEA conferences for helpful feedback. We gratefully acknowledge funding for this research from Pivotal Ventures, Washington Center for Equitable Growth, Russell Sage Foundation, and Ford Foundation, and support from the Columbia Population Research Center which is funded by the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) through grant P2CHD058486.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the National Quality Forum have endorsed the 30-day mortality rate as an important indicator of hospital quality. Concerns have been raised, however, as to whether postdischarge mortality rates are reasonable measures of hospital quality as they consider the frequency of an event that occurs after a patient is discharged and is no longer under the watch and care of hospital staff.