Twenty-three hospitals have been recognized as the top in the country for quality care and operational efficiency by the Premier healthcare alliance.
The alliance comprises more than 2,100 U.S. hospitals and 58,999 other healthcare sites.
Premier chose the hospitals from more than 3,796 eligible hospitals nationwide at Premier’s annual Breakthroughs Conference and Exhibition in Anaheim, Calif.
Premier’s Award for Quality recognizes leading healthcare organizations that efficiently provide outstanding patient care and consistently set the standard in clinical excellence nationwide.
“This award honors the employees, physicians, and volunteers who each day give 100 percent of their best efforts and expertise to improve patient care, research new cures, educate healthcare professionals, promote efficiency, and provide compassionate supportive services for patients and their families,” said Robert C. Garrett, actingpresident and chief executive officer of Hackensack University Medical Center, one of the honored hospitals.
Premier measures top performers at the overall hospital level, taking into consideration performance-based criteria, including clinical quality outcomes, resource utilization, and clinical process indicators.
“The Award for Quality honors the efforts of our nation’s leading hospitals to provide superior quality and operational efficiency,” said Susan DeVore, Premier’s incoming president and CEO. “We’re thrilled to celebrate the efforts of these facilities as they improve the health of the communities they serve.”
Premier considered all acute care inpatient facilities in the United States that submitted data to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the CMS Hospital Compare project. Using MedPar 2007 data, quality and efficiency indexes were calculated for 62 disease groups and at the overall hospital level.
Premier measured quality by the incidence of three adverse outcomes: mortality, morbidity and complications, which are combined into a single quality index using the preference weightings from the Corporate Hospital Rating Project. The efficiency index was generated using length of stay to proxy for resource utilization.
Acute care facilities attaining the top 1 percent designation are identified as having scores in the top two quintiles for process of care and in 10 out of 62 disease groups and at the overall hospital level for quality and efficiency. Additionally, hospitals had measures for quality and efficiency that were equal to or exceeded expected outcomes.