In Their Own Words: Hospital Leaders Describe What It Means to be America’s Best

The recently announced 2019 Healthgrades America’s Best Hospitals™ represent hospitals that consistently deliver superior care across the most common inpatient procedures and conditions. These hospitals are the nation’s clinical leaders and where consumers want to seek care. Patients treated at one of America’s Best Hospitals have, on average, a 27.1% lower risk of mortality than if treated at non-recipient hospitals. Additionally, this year’s analysis shows that from 2015 to 2017, if all hospitals as a group performed similarly to the America’s Best Hospitals, on average, 168,165 lives could potentially have been saved.¹ Healthgrades identifies America’s Best Hospitals and stratifies recipients into three categories: America’s 50 Best Hospitals, America’s 100 Best Hospitals, and America’s 250 Best Hospitals.

In today’s competitive healthcare market, hospital leaders understand that building trust in their clinical performance is essential to organizational longevity and prominence. Maintaining focus and driving progress on quality improvement is an immense task that requires large-scale change across the entire organization, from executives to physicians to support staff. The struggles of steering a hospital through continuous improvement efforts and then reaping the organizational benefits from such demanding work are stories worth telling, and we’ve asked leaders from some of America’s Best Hospitals™ to share their quality improvement journey and what this award means to them. Here’s what they had to say:

1. “Peninsula Regional’s greatest asset is our team of employees, providers, nurses, and volunteers. It’s a simple philosophy: Achieving a designation as one of America’s BEST 250 hospitals can only happen when a team is dedicated and devoted to a multidisciplinary approach involving both clinical and non-clinical partners focused on constantly improving processes and embracing change to enhance exceptional care, quality and safety throughout the health system. To be placed among the nation’s best hospitals, once again, by Healthgrades reinforces that we have assembled the finest healthcare team in the region that is committed to outstanding clinical outcomes and patient care.” Steve Leonard, MBA, FACHE – President/CEO, Peninsula Regional Health System, Peninsula Regional Medical Center
2. “We are honored to be recognized among America’s 250 Best Hospitals by Healthgrades,” said Orange Regional Medical Center’s President & CEO Scott Batulis. “At Orange Regional we put patient safety first.  We are committed to operational excellence which includes clinical outcomes, patient satisfaction, employee engagement and financial health. Our quality journey utilizes the Baldrige framework.  We have a transparent system of reporting quality issues that allows us to correct system failures and prevent future problems.  We are most grateful to our dedicated physicians, employees and volunteers who go above and beyond for our patients. ”
3. We are always striving to find better ways to provide the best care possible for our patients. Multi-disciplinary teams across our organization collaborate with each other, as well as with our patients and their families, to continuously improve quality, safety, and the patient experience. We want to transform health care for the benefit of patients and providers. With that as a goal, we seek innovative ways to do our work rather than rely on yesterday’s solutions or standards.” Gary S. Kaplan, MD – Virginia Mason Chairman and CEO
4. “At PIH Health we are committed to providing excellent and compassionate care to members of our community. As a hospital located in the second largest metropolitan area in the country, we serve a population that is larger than 15 individual states. We continue to improve our services by investing in technology and supportive care. We are expanding our reach by opening new facilities in Los Angeles and Orange counties. To help ensure the delivery of high-quality care we have opened a simulation center that will help us to constantly provide high-level training to our physicians, nurses, and staff to prepare them for almost any medical situation.” James R. West – President and CEO, PIH Health   
5. “Caring for others is a calling, and not always an easy one. But I’ve witnessed firsthand how much the people who work at Cheyenne Regional Medical Center genuinely care for our patients and one another. This recognition from Healthgrades is a reflection of that caring and also the focus on quality that I see taking place here at Cheyenne Regional Medical Center each and every day. On behalf of the leaders and trustees at CRMC, I want to thank and congratulate our providers and our entire workforce for this much-deserved recognition.” Jean Halpern, MD – President of the Board of Trustees, Cheyenne Regional Medical Center
6. Karen Orr, RN, MSN, MBA, CMSRN, CEO of Providence Medical Center, credits the staff and physicians on having systems in place to garner high quality, patient safety outcomes. “This recognition demonstrates our hospital’s commitment to patient safety and quality,” she said.

The quality journey each hospital takes is unique, but a common thread among America’s Best Hospitals appear to be: building collaborative care teams, embracing leading clinical practices, being transparent and accountable with quality metrics, ensuring the patient is always at the center of care decisions and recognizing that there is always room for improvement.

See the full list of America’s Best Hospitals here. For more information about America’s Best Hospitals and to learn how to differentiate your hospital in a competitive market, connect with us or send us an email.

Hospitals that receive the America’s Best Hospitals award outperform their peers in treating a core group of conditions that account for, on average, more than 80% of mortalities in areas evaluated by Healthgrades². Also, America’s Best Hospital recipients are, on average, five times more likely than other facilities to have received a Healthgrades five-star rating for treating some of the most frequent conditions presenting in the emergency room³.

¹ Statistics are based on Healthgrades analysis of MedPAR data for years 2015 through 2017 and represent three-year estimates for Medicare patients only.

² Heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia, respiratory failure, sepsis, and stroke. Based on Healthgrades analysis of treatments across 19 rated conditions and procedures where mortality is the outcome.

³ Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, heart attack, pneumonia, sepsis, and stroke. As reported by Healthgrades in Hospital Choice: Your Life May Depend on It, 2016.