And by improving quality, hospitals can also hold down the cost of health care.
"Doing something wrong or doing it not well always comes with a higher price tag," said Ron Czajkowski, a spokesman for the New Jersey Hospital Association. "Improved quality means improved efficiency, which leads to reduced costs."
Czajkowski praised the state's foray into measuring quality, but he and others, including Lacy, cautioned against using the report to judge a hospital's overall quality.
"The public should not rush to the judgment that just because a hospital didn't score well on these indicators, it is not a quality institution," Czajkowski said.
Patients who need hospital care should use the report as part of the conversation they have with their doctors over which institution to choose, Czajkowski and others said.
With this report, New Jersey joins other states, including Pennsylvania, in trying to provide patients a way to assess the quality of hospitals in treating specific injuries and illnesses.
In Pennsylvania, the Health Care Cost Containment Council issues a report each year measuring the outcomes of patients in 71 common medical-treatment areas. The New Jersey report examined whether heart attack and pneumonia patients got recommended treatments - known as process measures - and not what ultimately happened to them.
"What I hope will evolve with time is public report cards that have both outcomes and process indicators," said David B. Nash, chairman of the department of health policy at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia.
Nash said such reports on quality of care were important because they got hospitals to focus on improving.
Nationally, more than a million people have heart attacks each year, and about 20 percent, or 200,000, of them die. Pneumonia accounts for half a million hospitalizations and 45,000 deaths a year.
