The Variations in Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) and Medicaid Mortality and Preventable Readmissions: A Master's Thesis to Evaluate Mortality and Readmissions as a quality of care indicator.

For this study, 169,397 hospital cases from the 1991 California Office of Statewide Health and Planning and Development Discharge Data Set were randomly sampled. This sample represented 50% of all 1991 hospitalization cases from hospitals in the state of California. The sampled cases were analyzed by payer type to determine whether statistically significant differences in preventable readmissions and deaths were evident. The data were controlled by race, type of diagnosis, number of diagnoses, and gender.