Panel decides not to post hospital mortality rates
By Liz Kowalczyk – Globe Staff / August 21, 2010

Rejecting a request from consumer advocates, a state panel decided this week not to publicly post overall patient death rates for individual Massachusetts hospitals, at least for now.

The state’s health and human services secretary, Dr. JudyAnn Bigby, who heads the group that made the decision, said current methodology for calculating hospital-wide mortality rates is so flawed that officials do not believe it would be useful to hospitals and patients and could harm public trust in government.

“If the reports that are generated from these methodologies don’t give hospitals useful information they can act on, what is the point?’’ she said.

Two years ago, Health Care for All, a Boston-based consumer advocacy group, asked the state’s Health Care Quality and Cost Council to look at making public hospitalwide mortality rates. The federal government and the state now publish death rates for certain individual procedures and conditions, such as pneumonia and heart attacks, but the hope was that one hospitalwide rate for all patients “would be a proxy for understanding the overall quality of care and safety at a hospital,’’ Bigby said.

Boston tea drinkers are an honest lot
Globe Staff – August 20, 2010 02:13 PM

The Hub is a hotbed of honesty. Sure, there may be filchers, frauds, and four-flushers, but Boston’s tea-drinking demographic may be the most honest group of tea drinkers in the nation.

So says a company called Honest Tea, a Maryland outfit that specializes in organic bottled teas.

Starting in June, Honest Tea set out on a just-concluded road trip of seven major cities. In each place, the company set up unmanned kiosks where bottles of Honest Tea could be purchased on the honor system. Hidden cameras were trained on the kiosks to monitor how many people opted to pay a dollar for a bottle – and how many absconded with an unauthorized freebie.

In Boston, the Honest Tea kiosk was set up on Boylston Street in the Back Bay, a company spokeswoman said.

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