Healthgrades, an online resource for information about physicians and hospitals, has announced the winners of its 2016 Healthgrades Patient Safety Excellence Award and the 2016 Healthgrades Outstanding Patient Experience Award.
The organization chooses hospitals for the Patient Safety Excellence Award examining the rate of observed incidents and expected performance for 14 Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality patient safety indicators.
Healthgrades chooses Outstanding Patient Experience Award recipients based on 10 patient experience measures from the HCAHPS survey of the hospital's own patients.
Highlighted below are eight things to know about the award winners and other patient safety-related findings.
Healthgrades Patient Safety Excellence Award
1. All total, Healthgrades recognized 466 hospitals across the nation with the 2016 Patient Safety Excellence Award.
2. The winners fall within the top 10 percent of all hospitals evaluated for their performance in preventing serious, potentially preventable complications during patients' hospital stays.
3. On average, more than 270,000 patient safety events could have been avoided if all hospitals, as a group from 2012 to 2014, performed similarly on each of 13 patient safety indicators evaluated by Healthgrades as the hospitals that performed "better than expected."
Healthgrades Outstanding Patient Experience Award
4. Healthgrades named 448 hospitals recipients of the 2016 Outstanding Patient Experience Award.
5. The winners fall within the top 15 percent of all hospitals evaluated for their performance in patient experience.
Additional findings
6. Four types of events make up nearly 75 percent of all patient safety events reported by hospitals: accidental cuts, punctures or hemorrhages; collapsed lung, infections and bed sores.
7. Patient Safety Excellence Award recipients are also equally or more likely than non-recipients to achieve superior outcomes in specialty areas, such as spinal surgery, orthopedics or pulmonary care.
8. Hospitals that are top performers in patient experience continuously monitor trends in what patients find important as it relates to their overall assessment of a hospital stay.
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