OBJECTIVES: To examine the association between venous thromboembolism (VTE) events and hospital quality for patients who underwent major orthopedic surgery. METHODS: Based on 2005-2007 national Medicare claims, all patients who underwent major orthopedic surgery were identified.  Rates for patients who had a VTE event during their initial hospitalization were calculated. By using the CompQualTM scoring algorithm, every provider in the Medicare dataset was ranked according to their quality. This algorithm, with an empirical Bayesian approach, combines volume and mortality rate of hospitals to create an index score. Hospitals are ranked in quintiles.  Logistic regression was used to see the effect of quality on VTE event rates. RESULTS: We obtained a sample that included 642 patients in the pulmonary embolism (PE) only group, 1950 patients in the deep vein thrombosis (DVT) only group, and 153 patients in the both PE and DVT group. After controlling for patients’ demographic and clinical factors, VTE events in low quality hospitals were almost 2.5 times higher than VTE events in high quality hospitals (p=0.000). CONCLUSIONS:  Any policy implementation that would decrease the variation in hospital quality would have a direct effect on the rates of VTE events.