Quality study identifies OMHS amid top 5 percent of hospitals | Business

Owensboro Medical Health System (OMHS) announced today that HealthGrades, a leading source of health care provider information, has named it a Distinguished Hospital for Clinical Excellence for the fourth consecutive year.  The award places it among the top 5 percent of hospitals nationwide for clinical performance. OMHS is one of only two hospitals to receive this award in Kentucky.

HealthGrades Hospital Quality and Clinical Excellence study, released today, identifies those hospitals with the best overall clinical performance across 26 medical diagnoses and procedures that the organization rates. The 263 top-performing hospitals represent only 5 percent of the nation’s hospitals, and each is designated as a HealthGrades Distinguished Hospital for Clinical Excellence.

“Owensboro Medical Health System can be proud of the contributions of its physicians, nurses and staff in achieving outstanding patient care,” said Kristin Reed, HealthGrades vice president of hospital ratings and author of the study. “The Owensboro community is fortunate to have access to some of the highest quality hospital care in the nation.”

Catharine Schmitt, MD, an OB/GYN and chair of the Medical Staff Quality Committee, said OMHS’s move toward quality improvement began more than eight years ago and reflects a cultural shift where the primary focus is on quality and patient safety.

“The improvements are a result of careful and thoughtful processes that include following evidence-based care and other initiatives undertaken by our hospital,” Schmitt said. If we improve quality everything else falls into place.”

Unlike other hospital quality studies, HealthGrades evaluates hospitals solely on clinical outcomes: risk-adjusted mortality and inhospital complications. HealthGrades’ analysis is based on approximately 40 million Medicare discharges for the years 2008, 2009 and 2010. Using these top-performing hospitals as a benchmark in this year’s HealthGrades study, HealthGrades quantifies the impact of differences in hospital quality in terms of lives lost and unexpected complications.

The HealthGrades study found that:

·  Distinguished Hospitals for Clinical Excellence (Top 5 percent in the nation), such as OMHS, outperformed all other hospitals across all of the 17 mortality cohorts and six of nine complication cohorts studied from 2008 through 2010.

·  Specifically, Distinguished Hospitals for Clinical Excellence had a 30.07 percent lower risk-adjusted mortality rate and a 1.86 percent lower risk-adjusted in-hospital complication rate among Medicare beneficiaries compared to all other hospitals.

·  In fact, if all hospitals performed at the level of Distinguished Hospitals for Clinical Excellence, 165,704 Medicare lives could potentially have been saved and 6,800 Medicare inhospital complications could potentially have been avoided.

Owensboro Medical Health System serves an 11-county region in western Kentucky and southern Indiana.