BOSTON — In a meeting for Mass General Brigham doctors in November 2024, Dr. Giles Boland, president of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, laid out the vision for becoming the best in the country. Thanks to a corporate merging of its hospitals, he said, the system was well on its way, making progress on delivering the best outcomes possible for patients, including its most important job — keeping people alive.
Boland specifically pointed to MGB’s strides on a metric called observed-to-expected mortality, which compares how many people died while admitted to the hospital, versus how many were projected to die, given their levels of illness.
“This is a motivating force for our people,” Boland said in the meeting, a recording of which was obtained by the Globe. “We can be proud of what we do.”
Nearly two years later, Mass General Brigham executives say they’ve continued to have resounding success. By streamlining quality metrics and focusing more intently on them, they say they have improved quality and saved the lives of at least 1,400 more people.
Executives point to Mass General Brigham’s hospitals soaring in quality rankings by Vizient, a health care analytics firm MGB called the industry gold standard. Rankings consider many metrics, including mortality stats, hospital infection rates, and how long patients stay. Unlike U.S. News and World Report’s list of best hospitals, which considers reputational scores from physician voting, Vizient’s data only looks at outcomes.
