Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital is proud to be named one of the nation's 100 Top Hospitals by Thomson Reuters Healthcare, a leading provider of information and solutions to improve the cost and quality of health care.

The Thomson Retuers 100 Top Hospitals National Benchmarks award selects winners using an objective, statistical comparison of hospital-wide performance using publicly available data. A 100 Top Hospitals winner, compared with similar hospitals on the measures listed below, has set national standards for organization-wide performance.

Performed annually, study looks at hospital-wide performance and is based on objective data from the most recent two years that measures excellence across nine areas:

• Adherence to Clinical Standards of Care
• Average Length of Stay
• Cash-to-Debt ratio
• Expenses
• Medical Complications
• Mortality
• Patient Safety
• Patient Satisfaction
• Profitability

What measurements are used to evaluate performance
What did the research find and why does this matter to the Good Samaritan Hospital community
See how Good Samaritan compares to other hospitals

For an overview of Good Samaritan Hospital’s recent awards click here

What measurements are used to evaluate performance?

The award is based on a set of measurements across the whole organization. The 100 Top Hospitals have been recognized as achieving high performance excellence in:

• Patient Outcomes Survival rates for all patients, 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.

• National Treatment Standards (core measures) A set of basic care practices that all heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia, and surgery patients should receive. Core measures were developed by the National Quality Forum (NQF) as minimum basic standards. A hospital is scored only on those core measures that the hospital reports publicly. You can see all hospitals’ specific core measures scores at qualitycheck.org and hospitalcompare.hhs.gov.

• Patient Satisfaction Patient rating of the hospital’s overall performance, as reported on the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS), a standardized patient survey instrument created by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and endorsed by the NQF and the Hospital Quality Alliance.

• Efficiency Length of patient stay and average expense. 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.

Findings

In general, the 2008 100 Top Hospitals® National award winners have higher survival rates and keep more patients from developing complications — all while maintaining financial stability.

If all Medicare inpatients received the same level of care as those in the 100 Top Hospitals winners:

• More than 107,500 additional patients would survive each year
• More than 132,000 patient complications would be avoided annually
• Expenses would decline by an aggregate $5.9 billion a year
• The average patient stay would decrease by nearly half a day

What does this award mean for Good Samaritan patients and the community?

• Higher survival rates
• Fewer complications
• A safer environment
• Higher patient satisfaction

When a patient is treated in a hospital, many specialized services are provided by many skilled professionals. To make sure the patient receives the best, most coordinated care, the hospital needs to be a well-managed organization. When all the departments and services of a hospital are working together, the hospital is significantly more likely to provide dependable, high-quality care because doing the right thing at the right time matters to everyone in the hospital—not just doctors.

Patients can feel comfortable that at Good Samaritan Hospital, its board, management, doctors on staff, nurses and hospital associates work together to constantly measure, review and improve performance to make it the best place to receive care.