Earlier this spring, the Mercy Springfield Communities leadership team was notified that our Springfield Hospital was named a recipient of the prestigious 2015 Truven Health Analytics Top 100 Hospital Award. This is a tremendous honor for our organization and coworkers.
For the 22nd year in a row, Truven analyzed 2,787 acute care hospitals in the U.S. using publicly reported Medicare data on Medicare including information about mortality, complications, patient safety, readmission, length of stay, expenses per discharge, and operating profit margin. Hospitals were then grouped together in five categories: major teaching, teaching, as well as large, medium and small community hospitals. Mercy Springfield was named one of twenty winners in the large community hospital category and was one of only three hospitals in the state (along with Mosaic Life Care St. Joseph and BJC West County) and the only one in southwest Missouri. Hospitals cannot pay to be named a Top 100 Hospital and Truven does not accept anything other than publicly reported data making it an objective and extremely reliable assessment of a hospital’s true performance. Mercy Springfield scored in the top 10% in the country for lowest complication rate and in the top 25% for mortality, length of stay, Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS), and operating profit margin.
To put in perspective the achievement of being named a Top 100 Hospital, if all U.S. hospitals attained the same quality, safety and cost metrics as the Top 100, the nation would have 126,500 fewer patient deaths, 109,000 fewer patient complications and $1.8 billion of savings in inpatient costs. Even more context can be gained by looking at the performance of other hospitals in the U.S. during the same time period. More than 90% of all hospitals had no change in mortality, complications, patient safety, and length of stay; 86% had no change in their profit margin and 76% reported no change in HCAHPS scores. Perhaps most remarkable is that only 2.6% of all hospitals in the U.S. reported a reduction in expenses per discharge. By comparison, in the first 7 months of the current fiscal year alone, Mercy Springfield has been able to reduce expenses per discharge by 4%.
Reading the substance behind this award and now fully understanding how substantial our results are compared to the rest of the nation makes sharing this news even more fun. We look forward to communicating further about this award and more importantly honoring you, our coworkers, for making it happen. Each one of you creates a real difference in the lives of your patients. Perhaps that type of feeling is hard to quantify and it may not get counted like a lot of other things when it comes to award time, but it matters – a lot. And always will. Thank you for all you do.
