Member News Releases
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
April 13, 2006
Sarah Bush Lincoln Named One of the Nation’s 100 Top Hospitals
Sarah Bush Lincoln Health Center was named one of the nation’s 100
Top Hospitals® today (February 27) by Evanston, Ill.-based Solucient®,
the nation's leading source of healthcare information products.
The award recognizes hospitals that have achieved excellence in
quality of care, operational efficiency, financial performance, and
adaptation to the environment. This is the first time Sarah Bush
Lincoln has been recognized with this honor.
The 13th edition of Solucient’s 100 Top Hospitals: National
Benchmarks for Success study appears in the February 27 issue of Modern
Healthcare magazine.
Sarah Bush Lincoln President and CEO Gary Barnett said, “We’re
honored to be recognized by Solucient as one of the top 100 hospitals
in the nation. The award demonstrates our commitment to be a strong and
viable resource for our community for many years to come.”
The award measures Sarah Bush Lincoln against 1119 small community
hospitals in the nation using 2003-2004 data. Of those small community
hospitals, Sarah Bush Lincoln was then measured against the top 19 and
compared favorably in the performance areas – Clinical Excellence,
Efficiency and Financial Health; and Responsiveness to the Community.
Barnett said, “Our employees work hard to provide quality care,
attending to a wide array of needs simultaeously. They also understand
the other side of the quality care equation is financial, and the
direct effect the financial performance of the organization has on the
Health System and the community. We would be hard pressed to grow as we
have without their resourcefulness. In doing so, it’s clear they’ve
always put our patients and our community’s interest first.”
The Health Center is a 187-bed hospital with outreach services
throughout a nine-county region and Lincolnland Home Health,
Lincolnland Hospice and In Home Medical providing services to 19
counties. The Health System employs 1490 people including 74 medical
providers. It has a strong balance sheet that provides the necessary
capital to improve and add technology, grow with the market, recruit
quality employees and respond to patient needs more quickly. In fiscal
year 2005, it provided more than
million in community benefit programs and social
responsibility. The Health System also has an “A” bond rating, which
enables it to access capital at lower interest rates.
Research showed that emergency departments (EDs) at winners of the
100 Top Hospitals National award tend to have a higher percentage of
patients requiring more complex treatment or admission to the hospital
than EDs at non-winners. Benchmark hospitals were approximately 9
percent more likely to have higher complexity or admitted patients from
the ED, after adjusting for hospital region and class.
The 100 Top Hospitals also have better patient safety as indicated
by risk-adjusted Patient Safety Indicator (PSI) rates that were
significantly lower than non-winners for nine of the 11 PSIs studied.
In addition, benchmark hospitals were also less likely to
experience adverse outcomes, also known as medical injuries, than peer
hospitals. The presence of any of adverse result, as defined by the PSI
list, significantly and negatively impacted the risk of death, patient
length of stay (LOS) and cost per case.
“The 100 Top Hospital award winners continue to demonstrate
significant distinctions in provision of value to their communities, as
shown by objective differences in clinical outcomes, patient safety,
efficient operations and financial stability,” said Jean Chenoweth,
senior vice president of Solucient's Center for Healthcare Improvement,
which is responsible for the 100 Top Hospitals program. “The heavier
volumes of the severely ill treated in EDs of these high-performing
hospitals may suggest different approaches to accommodating the
physician office-level needs of the community – possibly through
partnerships or alternate care services to streamline EDs.”
Other key findings of the study include:
- If all acute care hospitals performed at the same level as the nation's benchmark hospitals, as many as 106,312 more Medicare patients could survive and an additional 117,000 patient stays could be complication-free each year - at an estimated annual savings of .6 billion.
- For the second straight year, the Midwest region was home to the highest number of national benchmark hospitals, confirming a shift from the South, which previously had the highest number of national award winners for nearly a decade.
- For the first time, a hospital – Evanston Northwestern Healthcare, Evanston Ill. – has achieved national benchmark status 11 times.
- Survival rates were higher at benchmark hospitals (96.9 percent) compared to the typical peer hospital (96.2 percent), translating into tens of thousands of lives saved.
- The 100 Top Hospitals treated sicker patients requiring more complex treatment, yet had better patient outcomes and lower costs.
- Salary and benefits were ,500 per year higher per full-time staff member than at peer hospitals.
The 13th edition of the Solucient 100 Top Hospitals: National
Benchmarks for Success study uses a balanced scorecard approach and
scores hospitals according to nine key organization-wide measures:
risk-adjusted mortality, risk-adjusted complications, patient safety,
growth in patient volume, severity-adjusted average length of stay,
expense per adjusted discharge, profit from operations, cash to debt
ratio and tangible assets per discharge.
More information on this study and other 100 Top Hospitals research is available at www.100tophospitals.com. Copies of the 100 Top Hospitals report can be purchased by calling Solucient at (800) 568-3282 or logging on to www.100tophospitals.com.