UW Hospital Only One in Madison to Land on Thomson’s Top 100 Hospitals List
MADISON - For the fourth time, UW Hospital and Clinics has been named one of the nation's 100 Top cardiovascular hospitals in the ninth annual benchmarking list compiled by Stamford, Connecticut-based Thomson Healthcare® (formerly Solucient).The annual Thomson award for cardiovascular services objectively measures performance on key criteria at 1,000 of the nation's top performing acute-care hospitals. UW Hospital and Clinics is one of only seven Wisconsin hospitals included on the list and the only one in the Madison area.
“We’ve really made an effort to stay on the cutting edge, maintaining our focus on quality, improving our facilities and expanding our programs for care,” says Dr. Matthew Wolff, (pictured) head of cardiovascular medicine at UW Hospital and Clinics. “The fact that Thomson continues to recognize those efforts year in and year out clearly tells us we’re doing the right things for our patients.”
UW Hospital and Clinics had lower mortality than the average Top 100 Hospitals for angioplasty and heart attack, and among the lowest mortality for bypass surgery and heart failure patients. UW Hospital and Clinics also performed better than the medians of other hospitals on the list.
The benchmarks are based on 2005 and 2006 Medicare MedPAR data and 2006 Medicare cost reports. The key findings in this year’s benchmarks focus not just on quality patient care, but also on efficiency and cost of care. Among other things, the benchmarks show that:
- Patients at the Top 100 Hospitals had hospital stays that were 12 percent shorter than peer hospitals
- Costs for care were 13 percent less - around $2,000 - than peer hospitals
- If all cardiovascular hospitals achieved the same results as Top 100 Hospitals, more than 7,000 lives would be saved and 750 medical complications avoided annually
Thomson scored facilities in eight key performance areas: risk-adjusted medical mortality, risk-adjusted surgical mortality, risk-adjusted complications, core measures score, percentage of bypass patients with internal mammary artery use, procedure volume, severity-adjusted average length of stay, and wage- and severity-adjusted average cost.
The measures were calculated for three classes of hospitals with the following number of winners in each:
- Teaching with cardiovascular residency programs, 30 winners
- Teaching without cardiovascular residency programs, 40 winners
- Community, 30 winners
The 2007 Thomson 100 Top Hospitals: Cardiovascular Benchmarks for Success study appears in the Nov. 19 edition of Modern Healthcare magazine.
More information on this study and other 100 Top Hospitals research is available at www.100tophospitals.com.
Date Published: 12/28/2007
