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100 Top Hospitals: Performance Improvement Leaders Fact Sheet
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UK HealthCare’s Chandler Medical Center has been named one of the nation’s 100 Top Hospitals for performance improvement by Solucient®, an organization that identifies the nation’s top performing hospitals. A total of 2,744 hospitals were studied and UK HealthCare is among the 15 major teaching hospitals recognized in the ranking. It is the only major teaching hospital in Kentucky to be recognized.
Solucient, based in Evanston, Ill., provides comparative measurements of cost and quality of health care facilities. Their findings revealed that in recent years, the ability of hospitals to improve performance over time has been minimal. UK HealthCare is recognized for demonstrating consistent improvement over five years (2000-2004) at a significantly faster rate than that of comparable teaching hospitals.
To select the 2005 honorees, three primary sources of data were used by Solucient:
• Publicly available Medicare Provider Analysis and Review data set
• Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Standard Analytical File Outpatient data set
• Medicare Cost Report
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)
The performance improvement study measures rate of change. The hospitals included on the list saw the fastest and most consistent rate of change. Nine measures of clinical quality practice, operations and financial management were used:
• Risk-adjusted mortality index
• Risk-adjusted complications index
• Risk-adjusted patient safety index
• Severity-adjusted average length of stay
• Expense per adjusted discharge, case mix- and wage-adjusted
• Profitability
• Cash to total debt ratio
• Tangible assets per adjusted discharge
• Growth in patient volume
Overall, Performance Improvement Leaders:
• Have fewer-than-expected patient complications, deaths and adverse safety events
• Show improving financial stability from little or no profit to a healthy profit margin of 5.8 percent.
• Are discharging patients two-thirds of a day earlier than five years ago.
• Are increasing their expenses by only 8 percent while their peers’ expenses increased 20 percent.
• Are growing their patient volume 5.3 percent, while their peers lost 1.5 percent of their patient volume.
UK HealthCare has made great strides to improve the quality of care for Kentuckians. Some recent
organizationwide improvements include:
• Since 2003, more than 1,000 new jobs have been created at the hospital, Kentucky Clinics and UK’s
medical colleges. This 20 percent increase in staff is needed to serve the 26 percent increase in
patients coming to UK HealthCare.
• A new Quality, Safety and Patient Rights program has been established, designed to provide the
highest quality, safest and most efficient health care by implementing 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 will begin in 2007 and be completed in 2010.
• UK HealthCare was among the first 40 hospitals in the U.S., out of more than 6,000 facilities, to
perform up to the standards of excellence of the Magnet Hospital Recognition Program® for outstanding nursing care. UK Hospital and Kentucky Children’s Hospital were granted renewed Magnet status in 2005. The recognition is from the American Nurses Credentialing Center. Studies show that Magnet hospitals have lower mortality rates, better patient satisfaction, more individual attention by nurses and shorter hospital stays.
For more information on UK HealthCare’s quality initiatives, call 1-800-333-8874 for a copy of the
UK HealthCare 2005 annual report.
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