Women receiving care at the nation’s top-performing hospitals, as determined by HealthGrades, have a nearly 41% lower risk-adjusted mortality rate and a 19% lower risk-adjusted complications rate than those treated at the nation’s poorest-performing facilities, according to a HealthGrades study.

For its seventh annual “Women’s Health in American Hospitals” report, HealthGrades analyzed approximately seven million Medicare hospitalization records from all of the nation’s approximately 5,000 non-federal hospitals across 16 procedures and diagnoses between 2006 and 2008. After performing a risk-adjusted analysis, HealthGrades researchers determined that women’s health outcomes vary significantly across hospitals and that “top hospitals”—those ranked in the top 5% by HealthGrades—improved their risk-adjusted mortality rates for women by 14.7% across three years, compared with 12.3% of all other hospitals.

According to HealthGrades, these performance gaps indicate that if all hospitals across the country performed at the level of the best-performing hospitals in women’s care, 16,863 deaths and 4,735 complications among women could potentially have been averted across the study period. The researchers also found that four conditions—pneumonia, heart failure (HF), stroke and myocardial infarction (MI)—accounted for roughly 81% of potentially preventable deaths.

Furthermore, the researchers found that outcomes among women and men vary “dramatically” at the same hospitals. Specifically, the study found that women have a higher risk-adjusted mortality for three cardiovascular procedures: valve-replacement surgery (52.8% higher risk), coronary bypass surgery (36.6%) and coronary interventional procedures (19.5%). Women also have a 5.8% higher mortality risk for stroke compared with men. However, women had a lower mortality rate for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, HF, pneumonia and MI, according to the study.