Truven names top 100 hospitals; See which facilities made the list

Truven Health Analytics has released its annual 100 Top U.S. hospitals based on their overall organizational performance, with winners showing improvement on key quality measures like inpatient mortality, complication rates, 30-day readmissions and lengths of stay, Truven said.

The study analyzed metrics from 2011 through 2015, evaluating "operational performance" in 11 areas including inpatient mortality; 30-day mortality rate; complications; 30-day risk-adjusted readmission rate; severity-adjusted average length of stay; Medicare spend per beneficiary; and Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems score, which is a patient rating of overall hospital performance.

Researchers evaluated 2,740 short-term, acute care, non-federal hospitals on the above metrics using public information like Medicare cost reports, core measures and patient satisfaction data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Hospital Compare website.

[Also: Healthgrades names 100 top hospitals for 2017; See the list]

The resulting rankings also exposed several notable trends. First, 30-day readmission rates are one of the most closely watched quality metrics, and 52 percent of U.S. hospitals showed "significant improvement" over the last five years. At the same time, 48 percent of hospitals stayed the same and just 0.1 percent got worse.

Risk-adjusted mortality also continued its upswing, with 21 percent of U.S. hospitals showing improvement over the study period and 79 percent of hospitals holding steady. Only 0.1 percent of hospitals saw an increase, said Truven, which was purchased by IBM's Watson unit last year.

Length of stay improved in 18 percent of U.S. hospitals, 76 percent held steady, and only 6 percent got worse.

Finally, 79 percent of hospitals held steady in the average cost of treating a patient and 2 percent improved. However, 19 percent of hospitals saw cost increases.

"The time period analyzed...coincides with the hospital industry's initial adoption of value-based care. The national improvement in quality metrics, concurrent with curbed growth in expense, may be a harbinger of future trends as more hospitals shift away from fee-for-service payment models," Truven said.

Here is the list of winners:

Twitter: @BethJSanborn