Saint Joseph’s Hospital has been named by an independent national research study as a recipient of the 2006 Distinguished Hospital Award for Patient Safety, according to HealthGrades, the nation’s leading healthcare ratings company.
This distinction ranks Saint Joseph’s Hospital among the top five percent nationally for patient safety outcomes. Saint Joseph’s is one of only 106 hospitals in the country to receive the Distinguished Hospital Award for Patient Safety for two consecutive years, and the only hospital in Georgia to do so.
“Patient safety is of the utmost concern to us and is an operational focus,” says Eugene Davidson, MD, interim president & CEO of Saint Joseph’s Health System. “Every employee and physician takes it as their personal responsibility to reach our goal of no preventable deaths or injuries.”
In its Third Annual Patient Safety in American Hospitals Study, HealthGrades independently analyzed nearly 40 million Medicare patient records from federal fiscal years 2002 to 2004 using 13 patient safety indicators developed by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). The patient records were obtained directly from the U.S. government’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. More than 5,100 teaching and non-teaching hospitals were analyzed in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, including all non-federal hospitals that submit Medicare data.
The HealthGrades study compares the rates of key patient safety events, such as post-operative infections and preventable deaths, using AHRQ’s methodology. A total of 1,593 U.S. hospitals (out of more than 5,100 evaluated) were eligible to receive the award, based on HealthGrades’ criteria that recipients must treat a wide range of medical conditions and demonstrate an acceptable level of clinical quality in terms of mortality and complication rates.
From the list of eligible recipients, hospitals that performed in the top fifteen percent in terms of outcomes are recognized as recipients of the 2006 Distinguished Hospital Award for Patient Safety. This year, a total of 238 hospitals (114 teaching and 124 non-teaching), including three hospitals in Georgia, received the prestigious award. This translates into the top five percent nationally for patient safety outcomes, when all U.S. hospitals are considered.
If all Medicare patients had been treated at Distinguished Hospitals for Patient Safety during that period, HealthGrades found that 280,134 patient safety events, 44,153 deaths and $2.45 billion in excess costs could have been avoided. On average, patients at Distinguished Hospitals for Patient Safety are also 43 percent less likely to experience an adverse, preventable event during their stay than patients treated at the bottom-performing hospitals.
“Medical errors are primarily an organizational issue resulting from inadequate or nonexistent systems that evidence suggest would reduce the probability of errors,” explained Samantha Collier, M.D., HealthGrades’ vice president of medical affairs. “In our experience, Distinguished Hospitals for Patient Safety have made a commitment to ensure adequate systems are in place, or soon to be in place, that effectively reduce errors.”
The Third Annual Patient Safety in American Hospitals Study and current clinical quality ratings for all U.S. hospitals are available, free of charge, on the web at www.healthgrades.com. More than two-and-a-half million unique users and 125 major employers visit the HealthGrades web site every month to access quality information about hospitals, nursing homes and physicians. HealthGrades also provides consumers and payers with medical cost comparisons for common procedures and diagnoses.
More information on the study’s methodology is available at www.healthgrades.com.
