Saint Joseph’s Hospital and its senior management team have been recognized with the 100 Top Hospitals® Performance Improvement Leaders award by Solucient. The award recognizes Saint Joseph’s culture of performance improvement across the organization for five consecutive years (1999-2004).
The study is designed to identify hospital leaders (CEOs, executive teams and boards) who have led their organizations to improve hospital-wide performance consistently, year-after year, at a substantially faster rate than peers across the country. The PI study specifically measures improvement of clinical outcomes, patient safety, efficiency, financial stability and growth.
“This award recognizes that Saint Joseph’s is committed from the top down, every day to provide the absolute best environment and services for our patients and staff,” says Eugene Davidson, MD, interim CEO and president of Saint Joseph’s Health System. “In an era of public reporting and pay-for-performance, the ability to improve year after year instills greater confidence from our patients and the community.”
The PI study, the first to measure the rate and consistency of hospital-wide performance improvement nationally based on management and clinical outcomes over a five year period, found that PI Leaders made the following gains between 2000 and 2004:
- They have fewer than expected complications, deaths and adverse safety events despite starting five years ago with higher than expected incidence.
- They improved financial stability going from being barely profitable to achieving a healthy positive profit margin of 5.8%.
- They discharge patients two-thirds of a day earlier than five years ago.
- They increased expenses by only 8%, while their peers' expenses increased 20%.
- They grew their patient volume 5.3 percent, while their peers lost 1.5 percent of their patient volume.
“Five years of steady, well-aligned improvement means that these 100 Performance Improvement (PI) Leaders have enormously increased the value they provide to their communities," says Jean Chenoweth, senior vice president, performance improvement & 100 Top programs, Center for Healthcare Improvement at Solucient.
Solucient’s 100 Top Hospitals: Performance Improvement Leaders study analyzed acute care hospitals nationwide using detailed empirical performance data from years 2000 through 2004, including publicly available Medicare MedPAR data, Medicare cost reports, and Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) outpatient data. Facilities recognized on the PI Leader list are represented across five hospital classes: major teaching (15), teaching (25), large community(250+ Beds- 20), medium community (100 to 249 Beds – 20) and small community (25 to 99 Beds- 20) hospitals.
