Hospitals in Midwestern States Lead the Nation in Performance

New National Benchmark Study Shows Higher Inpatient Survival, Lower Complications

EVANSTON, IL – February 28, 2005 – A new study by Solucient® shows that hospitals in the Midwestern states have taken the lead in setting new national benchmarks for survival, increased safety, “complication-free” care and overall hospital operational performance. The study also reports that U.S. hospitals as a whole have improved outcomes and reduced lengths of stay, suggesting that performance improvement efforts are beginning to have a positive impact.

The findings are part of the Solucient 100 Top Hospitals®: National Benchmarks for Success, 12th Edition study which annually examines changing performance levels in U.S. hospitals across four critical performance areas: quality of care, efficiency, financial performance, and growing community service. Patient safety was measured for the first time in this edition of the study. The 100 Top Hospitals study is unique in using a balanced scorecard approach to identify new national benchmarks for organization-wide performance, and names hospitals that set benchmarks in five categories: major teaching hospitals, teaching hospitals, large community hospitals, medium community hospitals, and small community hospitals. The 100 winners will be announced in the February 28 issue of Modern Healthcare.

For the first time, two hospitals have achieved national benchmark status ten times in the 12 years of the 100 Top Hospitals: National Benchmarks for Success study: Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, Mass., and Evanston Northwestern Healthcare, Evanston Ill. No other hospitals have so consistently achieved national benchmark status.

The study shows that more than 90 percent (11 of 12) of states performing in the top quintile (the best performance) were in the Midwest. Previously, states in the top quintile of performance were more evenly distributed around the country. States that fell from the top quintile for performance include Florida, Maryland, Tennessee, Missouri and Montana.

“The new benchmark hospitals have set the bar much higher for patient outcomes, patient safety, operational performance and improved value for the community,” says Jean Chenoweth, senior vice president of Solucient's Center for Healthcare Improvement, which is responsible for the 100 Top Hospitals program. “To achieve these new benchmarks, the whole organization — not just one clinical service line — must be aligned to achieve performance improvement goals. The board of trustees, the management team, and the entire hospital and medical staff must align their efforts over years to reach national benchmark levels of performance.”

“The impact of performance on a community with a national benchmark hospital is strikingly different from communities with non-winning hospitals,” says David Foster, Ph.D., vice president of clinical informatics at Solucient. “The study shows that if all acute care hospitals performed at the same level as the nation's benchmark hospitals, as many as 66,342 more Medicare patients could survive and an additional 66,506 patient stays could be complication-free each year — at an estimated annual savings of $6.2 billion.”

Other findings of the study include:

• The South showed the weakest performance with nearly 60 percent of its states (10 of 17) in the bottom two quintiles of performance.
• The 100 Top Hospitals treated sicker patients with fewer staff, yet had better patient outcomes.
• Salary and benefits were $1,900 per year higher per full-time staff member than at peer hospitals.
• On average, benchmark hospitals released their patients nearly half a day earlier than peer hospitals.
• Small community hospital winners had the highest survival rate (97 percent) of all hospital categories, meaning that about 12 additional patients survived in small communities with benchmark hospitals compared to small communities without benchmark hospitals.

The twelfth edition of the Solucient 100 Top Hospitals: National Benchmarks for Success study analyzed acute care hospitals nationwide and used publicly available empirical performance data from the 2002 and 2003 MedPAR databases and 2003 Medicare cost reports. The measures were calculated for five classes of hospitals with the following number of winners in each:

• Major Teaching - 15 winners
• Teaching - 25 winners
• Large Community, 250+ Beds - 20 winners
• Medium Community, 100 to 249 Beds - 20 winners
• Small Community, 25 to 99 Beds - 20 winners

The study uses a balanced scorecard approach and scores hospitals according to 9 key organization-wide measures: risk-adjusted mortality, risk adjusted complications, patient safety, growth in percent community served, severity adjusted average length of stay, expense per adjusted discharge, profit from operations, cash to debt ratio and tangible assets per discharge.

Media Notes:
More information on these studies and other 100 Top Hospitals research is available at www.100tophospitals.com. An executive summary of the 100 Top Hospitals: National Benchmarks for Success study is available to the media by emailing sparmet@solucient.com or by registering at http://www.100tophospitals.com/media/Register.asp

To schedule an interview with Jean Chenoweth, senior vice president, performance improvement and 100 Top Hospital programs, Solucient Center for Healthcare Improvement, contact Sharon Parmet at (847) 424-4265 or sparmet@solucient.com.

About Solucient
Solucient® is an information products company serving the healthcare industry. It is the market leader in providing tools and vital insights that healthcare managers use to improve the performance of their organizations.

By integrating, standardizing and enhancing healthcare information, Solucient provides comparative measurements of cost, quality and market performance. Solucient's expertise and proven solutions enable providers, payers and pharmaceutical companies to drive business growth, manage costs and deliver high quality care. For more information, visit www.solucient.com.