Special feature: 27 hospitals join 100 Top club for the first time
Clinical quality-improvement programs among efforts helping organizations place among the annual 100 Top Hospitals roster
Readmissions at an inpatient heartfailure unit at Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas plummeted to 7% from 29% in nine months.
To garner those results, patients participated in a standardized education process and then signed an agreement, signaling their intent to follow their care plans. They also were sent home with a two-week supply of all of their medications.
Nurses on the unit followed up with these patients through regular telephone calls, which continued until patients’ first post-discharge visit with their cardiologist.
The nursing unit’s manager developed the program after she attended ABC Baylor, a systemwide quality-improvement training program.
“Quality is everybody’s responsibility,” says John Mcwhorter, president of Baylor University Medical Center and a senior vice president at Baylor Health Care System.
The focus on clinical quality improvement appears to have had an impact because Baylor have been perennial members of the list were not on it this year, including Northshore University Health System, Evanston, Ill.; Advocate Lutheran General Hospital, Park Ridge, Ill.; Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago; Mayo ClinicRochester (Minn.) Methodist Hospital; and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston.
To select the 100 Top, or benchmark institutions, hospitals with at least 25 beds were scored against others within the same categories: Major teaching hospitals (400 or more beds and high levels of physician education and research); teaching hospitals (200 or more beds and some physician education) and three tiers of community hospitals: large (250 or more beds), medium (100-249 beds) and small (25-99 beds). A total of 2,886 hospitals were included in this year’s study.
Data for the Thomson Reuters analysis came from a variety of CMS sources, including cost reports, the Medicare Provider Analysis and Review (MEDPAR) data, Hospital Compare, and Hospital Consumer Assess- University Medical Center was named for the first time to the Thomson Reuters 100 Top Hospitals: National Benchmarks for Success, 2012. The hospital’s sister institution, Baylor Medical Center at Waxahachie (Texas), was named to the list for the second time.
Thomson Reuters released the list exclusively to Modern Healthcare.
Among this year’s 100 Top hospitals, 27 are newcomers to the list. Others are long-time members of the list, including:
Munson Medical Center, Traverse City, Mich., which has appeared 14 times; two hospitals in Nashville: Vanderbilt University Medical Center, 13 times, and St. Thomas Hospital, 11 times; and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, 10 times.
But other well-known organizations that