Trinity Regional Medical Center is one of the best places in the United States for patients with cardiovascular disease to receive treatment. That's the finding of the 11th edition of the Thomson Reuters "100 Top Hospitals: Cardiovascular Benchmarks" study released Monday.
For the second consecutive year, Thomson Reuters ranked TRMC among the 100 U.S. hospitals that set the nation's "benchmarks for inpatient cardiovascular services."
Analysts compared data from 971 hospitals after assigning each hospital to one of three comparison groups:
Teaching hospitals with cardiovascular residency programs.
Teaching hospitals without cardiovascular residency programs.
Community hospitals.
According to a Thomson Reuters fact sheet, "Within the comparison groups, each hospital was ranked on the basis of its performance on each of eight major performance measures using 2008 Medicare cost reports and 2007 and 2008 MedPAR data. Thomson Reuters then summed each hospital's performance-measure ranking to arrive at a total ranking for the hospital. The hospitals with the best total ranking in each comparison group were selected as the benchmarks."
TRMC was one of only 30 community hospitals nationally to achieve Top 100 benchmark status this year and is the only such hospital in Iowa to be so designated.
The study strongly suggests that getting care at one of the Top 100 Hospitals may significantly improve a patient's likelihood of doing well. It found that these hospitals have:
17 percent lower mortality rates for heart attack patients;
10 percent lower mortality rates for heart failure patients;
27 percent lower mortality for bypass surgery patients;
22 percent lower mortality following percutaneous coronary intervention;
Fewer post-operative complications - 99 percent of patients were complication-free;
Close to 12 percent shorter average hospital stay; and
12 percent lower cost per case.
One reason for the good results may be that the top-performing hospitals have physicians and other personnel who are very experienced. According to Thomson Reuters, the top cardiovascular hospitals perform more than 50 percent more cardiac surgeries than similar hospitals.
"These hospitals provide balanced high performance across cardiovascular services. This means they are providing high quality and highly efficient services at a reasonable cost in comparison to peers across the United States," said Jean Chenoweth, senior vice president for performance improvement and 100 Top Hospitals programs at Thomson Reuters, in a statement releasing the study findings.
Contact Terrence Dwyer at (515) 573-2141 or tdwyer@messengernews.net