Vidalia Makes the Cut as Reuters Announces Top 100 Hospitals

Meadows Regional Medical Center in Vidalia is the only Georgia hospital to make the list in the small community hospital winners.


/PRNewswire/ -- The Healthcare business of Thomson Reuters today released its annual study identifying the 100 top U.S. hospitals based on their overall organizational performance.

The Thomson Reuters 100 Top Hospitals(R): National Benchmarks study is based on the 100 Top Hospitals National Balanced Scorecard that evaluates performance in nine areas: mortality, medical complications, patient safety, average length of stay, expenses, profitability, cash-to-debt ratio, patient satisfaction, and adherence to clinical standards of care. The study has been conducted annually since 1993.

"The 100 Top Hospitals winners raised the bar again this year, delivering a higher level of reliable care and greater value for their communities and payers," said Jean Chenoweth, senior vice president for performance improvement and 100 Top Hospitals programs at Thomson Reuters.

Thomson Reuters also is launching the 100 Top Hospitals: Everest Award for National Benchmarks to recognize those hospitals among the 100 winners that delivered the greatest rate of improvement over a five-year period. This marks the first time the 100 Top Hospitals national benchmarks have been integrated with data reflecting long-term performance trends to identify the top-performing hospitals that are improving at the fastest rate. This year, there are 23 Everest award winners.

"Integration of national benchmarks for improvement and top performance is an innovation that enables Thomson Reuters to identify those hospitals with a mature culture of performance improvement," Chenoweth said. "The ability to objectively gauge where a hospital stands in its journey to excellence is a breakthrough in the measurement of leadership effectiveness, the success of organizational improvement strategies, and the impact of executive decisions."

"The boards, executives and physician leaders of the Everest award-winning hospitals developed long-term strategies and executed them with extraordinary skill and extraordinary results," she said. "The Everest award winners have reached the point at which innovation is a must to improve further."

To conduct the 100 Top Hospitals study, Thomson Reuters researchers evaluated 3,000 short-term, acute care, non-federal hospitals. They used public information -- Medicare cost reports, Medicare Provider Analysis and Review (MedPAR) data, and core measures and patient satisfaction data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Hospital Compare data set.

If all Medicare inpatients received the same level of care as patients treated in the winning hospitals:

-- More than 107,500 additional patients would survive each year.
-- Nearly 132,000 patient complications would be avoided annually.
-- Expenses would decline by $5.9 billion a year.

-- The average patient stay would decrease by nearly half a day.

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