HealthGrades Study Names North Memorial Distinguished Hospital for Clinical Excellence™ Seven Years in a Row

North Memorial announced today that HealthGrades, the nation’s most trusted source of health care provider information, has named it a Distinguished Hospital for Clinical Excellence™ for the seventh consecutive year. This prestigious distinction places North Memorial among the Top 5% of hospitals nationwide for clinical performance.

The HealthGrades Hospital Quality and Clinical Excellence study, objectively identifies those hospitals with the best overall clinical performance across 26 medical diagnoses and procedures. The 263 top-performing hospitals represent only 5% of the nation’s hospitals and each is designated as a HealthGrades Distinguished Hospital for Clinical Excellence".

"North Memorial can be proud of the contributions of its physicians, nurses and staff in achieving outstanding patient care," said Kristin Reed, MPH, HealthGrades vice president of hospital ratings and author of the study. "The Twin Cities northwest metro area is fortunate to have access to some of the highest quality hospital care in the nation."

This recognition is the result of several initiatives and quality improvements the medical center has recently implemented including:

North Memorial Stroke Center - Get With The Guidelines Silver Plus Achievement Award from the American Heart Association (AHA).
The Hope Chest Breast Center of North Memorial - Breast Imaging Center of Excellence by the American College of Radiology (ACR).
North Memorial Medical Intensive Care Unit - Gold Level Beacon Award for Excellence by the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN).
North Memorial Nursing Units - implemented the Transforming Care at the Bedside (TCAB) initiative whereby bedside staff nurses brainstorm ways to improve processes and test new ideas on a select group of patients.

Unlike other hospital quality studies, HealthGrades evaluates hospitals solely on clinical outcomes: risk-adjusted mortality and in-hospital complications. HealthGrades’ analysis is based on approximately 40 million Medicare discharges for the years 2008, 2009 and 2010. Using these top-performing hospitals as a benchmark in this year’s HealthGrades study, HealthGrades quantifies the impact of differences in hospital quality in terms of lives lost and unexpected complications.

The HealthGrades study found that:

Distinguished Hospitals for Clinical Excellence (Top 5% in the nation) such as North Memorial outperform all other hospitals across all of the 17 mortality cohorts and six of nine complication cohorts studied from 2008 through 2010.
Specifically, Distinguished Hospitals for Clinical Excellence had a 30.07% lower risk-adjusted mortality rate and a 1.86% lower risk-adjusted in-hospital complication rate among Medicare beneficiaries compared to all other hospitals.
In fact, if all hospitals performed at the level of Distinguished Hospitals for Clinical Excellence, 165,704 Medicare lives could potentially have been saved and 6,800 Medicare in-hospital complications could potentially have been avoided.

HealthGrades, headquartered in Denver, Colorado, is a leading provider of comprehensive information about physicians and hospitals. More than 200 million consumers use the HealthGrades websites, including HealthGrades.com and BetterMedicine.com, to research, select, and connect with a physician or hospital, and use its comprehensive information about clinical outcomes, patient satisfaction, patient safety, and health conditions to make more informed healthcare decisions and take action. More information on how HealthGrades guides Americans to their best health can be found at www.healthgrades.com.