Fig. 2

Variation in cardiovascular mortality in kidney transplant patients across U.S. hospitals. Across a broad sample of hospitals in the United States, among kidney transplant recipients, there was tremendous variation noted in un-adjusted mortality for patients admitted with a cardiovascular disease process (including myocardial infarction, stroke, congestive heart failure, dysrhythmia, cardiac arrest, or malignant hypertension). The overall hospital mortality was 3.4%, but had a wide range. The crude mortality trends indicated that non-transplant hospitals were over-represented in both low and high mortality outlier groups. A greater proportion of non-transplant hospitals (37.1%) were designated as high mortality hospitals (> 5%) compared to transplant hospitals (26.9%). This relationship was not uniform across all hospital-specific mortality categories, which warranted further analysis using multivariate hierarchical models