2.23.2010
News Room: St. Elizabeth Edgewood Named Among HealthGrades America’s 50 Best Hospitals
St. Elizabeth Edgewood announced today that it has been named a HealthGrades America’s 50 Best Hospital for 2010 in a report issued by HealthGrades, the leading independent healthcare ratings organization.
The report, which analyzes objective patient outcomes at all 5,000 of the nation’s non-federal hospitals, places St. Elizabeth Edgewood in the top 1% of all hospitals in the nation.
According to the report, there is a wide variation in quality when comparing the Medicare patient outcomes of St. Elizabeth Edgewood and the rest of the HealthGrades America’s 50 Best Hospitals against all others. On average, patients admitted to America’s 50 Best Hospitals have better mortality rates and are less likely to suffer from major complications when compared with patients admitted to other hospitals. If all hospitals operated at the same level as the 50 Best, 164,964 deaths and 18,900 in-hospital complications could have potentially been prevented.
To determine HealthGrades America’s 50 Best Hospitals, HealthGrades analyzed more than 130 million Medicare hospitalization records from every non-federal hospital in the nation. Hospitals must meet minimum thresholds in terms of patient volumes, quality ratings, and the range of services provided. Specifically, hospitals were evaluated based on the risk-adjusted mortality and complication rates across 26 procedures and treatments, from hip replacement to bypass surgery. Hospitals that were in the top 5% of all hospitals for the most consecutive years were named HealthGrades America’s 50 Best Hospitals. The full methodology can be found in the report posted at http://www.healthgrades.com.
St. Elizabeth Edgewood is also Best in Greater Cincinnati for overall orthopedics, joint replacement and spine surgery as well as Overall Cardiac Services and Cardiology. Overall, St. Elizabeth Healthcare has achieved eight specialty excellence awards and 27 five-star ratings according to HealthGrades.
“The HealthGrades America’s 50 Best Hospitals have demonstrated clinical outcomes that are the best in the nation, and they have sustained that level of quality year in and year out,” said Rick May, MD, a HealthGrades' vice president and one of the study’s authors. “That indicates that these hospitals have leadership, operational structures and clinical teams that are capable of producing excellence in a way that others cannot. These hospitals should be congratulated, and those in their community should feel proud of the quality of care being delivered.”
St. Elizabeth Healthcare
St. Elizabeth Healthcare features six facilities throughout Northern Kentucky—St. Elizabeth Covington, St. Elizabeth Edgewood, St. Elizabeth Falmouth, St. Elizabeth Florence, St. Elizabeth Fort Thomas, and St. Elizabeth Grant. It also has vast resources to serve the Greater Cincinnati area, including 1,192 licensed beds, more than 6,000 employees, more than 900 physicians with admitting privileges, 34 primary care office locations, and five free-standing imaging centers. St. Elizabeth Healthcare is sponsored by the Diocese of Covington, providing an estimated $68.6 million in uncompensated care and benefit to the community in 2008.