Baptist, Geisinger and Banner Health Systems are among the top 15 U.S. health systems named so for their balanced system-wide clinical performance.
Thomson Reuters recently released its fourth annual study identifying the top U.S. hospitals; all of them showed high quality and low 30-day mortality rates.
The study is culled from data from more than 300 organizations and singled out 15 hospital systems that achieved superior clinical outcomes based on a composite score of eight measures of quality, patient perception of care and efficiency.
Researchers looked at eight metrics that gauge clinical quality and efficiency: mortality, medical complications, patient safety, average length of stay, 30-day mortality rate, 30-day readmission rate, adherence to clinical standards of care (evidence-based core measures published by the CMS), and HCAHPS patient survey score (part of a national initiative sponsored by the HHS to measure the quality of care in hospitals).
Among the key findings in the study were the following:
- Lower 30-Day Mortality Rates: They all held post-discharge 30-day mortality rates steady, while peer health systems demonstrated a significant increase in post- discharge mortality.
- Better Survival Rates: Winning hospitals had 17 percent fewer deaths than expected considering patient severity, while non-winning hospitals had 4 percent more deaths than expected.
- Fewer Complications: Patients of the winning health systems had 19 percent fewer complications.
- Shorter Hospital Stays: Patients treated in the winning system hospitals have a median average length of stay of 4.7 days, nearly half a day shorter than their peers' median of 5.1 days.
- Better Patient Safety and Core Measure Adherence: Top health systems had 23 percent fewer adverse patient safety events than expected and had better adherence to core measures of care than their peers.
The study divides the top health systems into three comparison groups based on total operating expense of the member hospitals. Large health systems, having more than $1.5 billion total operating expenses included Banner Health System; Geisinger Health System was a winner in the medium health system category, having expenses between $750 to $1.5 billion), and Baptist Health Systems, of Montgomery, AL, was among the winners in the small health systems category, operating at less than $750 million.
U.S. health systems with two or more short-term, general, non-federal hospitals; cardiac and orthopedic hospitals; and critical access hospitals were assessed in the study.
Source: Thomson Reuters, January 16, 2012
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Case Study in Bundled Payments: The Baptist Health System Experience
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