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100 Top Hospitals: Solucient® ranks UK HealthCare among the nation's best
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The UK Albert B. Chandler Hospital has been named one of the nation’s 100 Top Hospitals in the 2006 edition of Solucient’s National Benchmarks for Success. UK Chandler Hospital is the only Lexington hospital and the only major academic medical center in Kentucky to be ranked in the study.
Solucient, based in Evanston, Ill., provides comparative measurements of cost and quality of health care facilities. The study compared patient safety, financial performance, efficiency, growth in patient volume and clinical outcomes (how well patients fared). The top hospitals have higher survival rates, keep more patients complication-free and attract more patients, while maintaining efficiency.
According to Solucient, if all hospitals performed like the benchmark hospitals, more than 100,000 additional patients could survive each year, and an additional 114,000 could avoid complications. With 25 percent higher admissions per bed, benchmark hospitals treated more patients than nonranked hospitals and also treated patients who were sicker and required more complex treatment.
This is the fourth time UK Chandler Hospital has been ranked one of the 100 Top Hospitals by Solucient, which has been identifying America’s top performing hospitals since 1993. Only a year ago, UK Chandler Hospital was named one of the 100 Top Hospitals for performance improvement for 2005. That award recognized UK HealthCare for demonstrating consistent improvement over five years (2000-2004) at a significantly faster rate than comparable teaching hospitals.
This year’s award builds on the previous award, placing UK Chandler Hospital firmly among the nation’s best performing university hospitals.
To select the 2006 honorees, three primary sources of data were used by Solucient:
- Publicly available Medicare provider data
- Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services outpatient data
- Medicare data
Hospitals were assigned to one of five peer groups according to size and teaching status.
- Major Teaching Hospitals (400 or more beds)
- Teaching Hospitals (200 or more beds)
- Large Community Hospitals (250 or more beds)
- Medium Community Hospitals (100-249 beds)
- Small Community Hospitals (25-99 beds)
According to Solucient, the 100 Top Hospitals national award is based on a set of measures that reflect highly effective performance across the whole organization, including board members, medical staff, management and nursing. These include:
- Patient outcomes: Survival rates for all patients, plus low rates of surgical complications such as infections and severe bleeding after surgery.
- Patient safety: Avoiding unwanted events, such as respiratory failure, infections and unexpected deaths in low-risk diseases, which occur infrequently, but which all hospitals are working to reduce.
- National treatment standards (core measures): A set of basic care practices that all heart attack, heart failure, and pneumonia patients should receive. Core measures were developed by the National Quality Forum as minimum basic standards. A hospital is scored only on those core measures that the hospital reports publicly. You can see all hospitals’ specific core measures scores at www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov and www.qualitycheck.org.
- Efficiency: Length of patient stay and average expense. In the best hospitals, all parts of the organization work together to do the right thing at the right time. When this happens, patients return to their daily lives faster and costs are usually lower.
- Financial stability: Profit and cash-to-debt ratio. A high-performing hospital must be well-managed financially so it can attract the best health care professionals, acquire new technology and expand services to improve results for patients. The top performing hospitals must have enough cash to pay down their bills and must generate a surplus to be financially stable and invest in the future.
- Growth in service: Growth from one year to the next in the number of patients seeking treatment in the hospital’s inpatient, emergency department, ambulatory surgery and outpatient services. Top hospitals are growing by attracting more patients. This growth is an indirect reflection of how satisfied patients are with the services provided.
UK HealthCare has made great strides to improve the quality of care for Kentuckians. Some recent organizationwide improvements include:
- UK HealthCare has implemented an innovative program in Quality, Safety and Patient Rights that organizers say could lead to health care improvements across the nation. The program is designed to bring an academic component to UK HealthCare’s efforts to provide the highest quality, safest and most efficient health care through the implementation of process improvement techniques.
- Development of a new $450 million patient care facility will provide the facilities to deliver the most advanced health care to Kentuckians. It is estimated to be the largest construction project in Kentucky. Construction work has already begun on a new patient parking garage. Work on the hospital breaks ground May 30, 2007, and is expected to be completed in 2011.
- The national Magnet Hospital Recognition Program® identifies and recognizes excellence in nursing services. UK Chandler Hospital nurses were the first in this region to be awarded Magnet status by the American Nurses Credentialing Center, and in 2005 both UK Chandler Hospital and Kentucky Children’s Hospital were redesignated Magnet hospitals. The Magnet program is based on quality indicators and standards defined by the American Nurses Association. It is the highest honor a hospital can receive for its nursing services.
For more information on UK HealthCare’s quality initiatives, call 1-800-333-8874 for a copy of the UK HealthCare 2006 Annual Report.
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