February 28, 2006 | More News

Winchester Medical Center Named One of the Nation’s 100 Top Hospitals

Winchester Medical Center has been named one of the nation's 100 Top Hospitals® according to Solucient’s 100 Top Hospitals: National Benchmarks for Success study. The medical center is the only community hospital in Virginia chosen for 2005.

The award recognizes hospitals that have achieved excellence in quality of care, operational efficiency, financial performance, and adaptation to the environment. The 13th edition of Solucient’s 100 Top Hospitals: National Benchmarks for Success study appears in the February 27 issue of Modern Healthcare magazine. This is the second time Winchester Medical Center has been named to the 100 Top Hospitals list.

“I’m very proud of the organization-wide achievement this award represents, requiring concerted effort at all levels – by our Board, management team, employees and medical staff -- to achieve excellence,” said Winchester Medical Center President Jim Woodward. “The hospital was selected from among its peers across the nation, based on objective statistical measurement of performance across five critical areas: clinical outcomes, patient safety, operational efficiency, financial stability and growth. Such balanced organizational performance reflects Winchester Medical Center’s ability to provide sustainable and reliable health care services and value to our patients and our community.”

Research Highlights
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:

• The 100 Top Hospitals treated sicker patients requiring more complex treatment, yet had better patient outcomes and lower costs.
• 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 $7.6 billion.
• 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.
• Salary and benefits were $1,500 per year higher per full-time staff member than at peer hospitals.
• 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.

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. Solucient is a healthcare information products company based in Evanston, Illinois.

More information on this study and other 100 Top Hospitals research is available at www.100tophospitals.com.