How are winners chosen?

Thomson Healthcare assigned each hospital in the study group to one of five comparison groups according to bed size: major reaching hospitals, teaching hospitals, large community hospitals, medium community hospitals and small community hospitals. Silver Cross is listed in the large community hospital group. Within the comparison groups, each hospital was ranked on a set of measures that reflect highly effective performance across the whole organization:

• Patient Outcomes: Survival rates for all patients plus low rates of surgical complications like infections and severe bleeding after surgery.

• Patient Safety: Avoiding unwanted events, like respiratory failure, infections and unexpected deaths in low-risk diseases, which occur infrequently, but which all hospitals are working to reduce. Silver Cross is one of the first hospitals in the area to use bar-code scanning technology to confirm a patient’s identity and prescription information before administering medications at the bedside. Using this new bedside medication verification system, recently a nurse was able to confirm that she was giving the right patient the right medication when she had three patients at the same time with the same last name. The hospital has also implemented a bedside alarm system that alerts nurses when patients are leaving the bed when they shouldn’t be. This technology plays an important role in preventing falls, especially with elderly patients.

• National Treatment Standards: A set of basic care practices that all heart attack, heart failure, and pneumonia patients should receive. Core measures were developed by the government (National Quality Forum) as minimum basic standards. A hospital is scored only on those core measures that the hospital reports publicly. You can view all hospital core measures at www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov.

• Efficiency: Length of patient stay and average expense. In the best hospitals, all parts of the organization work together to do the right thing at the right time. When this happens, patients return to their daily lives faster and costs are usually lower.

• Financial Stability: Profit and cash-to-debt ratio. A high performing hospital must be well managed financially so it can attract the best healthcare professionals, acquire new technology and expand services to improve results for patients. The top-performing hospitals must have enough cash to pay down their bills and must generate a surplus to be financially stable and invest in the future. Thomson Healthcare then summed each hospital’s performance-measure ranking to arrive at a total ranking for the hospital.