Community Healthcare System Recognized by Patients and Healthgrades for Outstanding Experience

Community-Healthcare-System-Recognized-by-Patients-and-Healthgrades-for-Outstanding-ExperienceHealthgrades® has announced that the hospitals of Community Healthcare System have achieved the Healthgrades 2016 Outstanding Patient Experience Award™. Community Hospital-Munster; St. Catherine Hospital-East Chicago and St. Mary Medical Center-Hobart have been identified as providing outstanding performance in the delivery of a positive experience for patients during their hospital stay, according to Healthgrades. Community Healthcare System is the only healthcare system in Indiana with all of its hospitals to achieve this award for 2016.

Healthgrades, the leading online resource for information about physicians and hospitals, evaluated some 3,858 hospitals that submitted at least 100 patient experience surveys to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The surveys covered admissions from April 2014 – March 2015, identifying hospital performance in this area.

Healthgrades evaluated performance by applying scoring to 10 patient experience measures, using data collected from a 32-question patient experience survey of the hospitals’ patients. The survey questions focus on patients’ perspectives of their care in the hospital. Question topics range from cleanliness and noise levels in patient rooms to factors such as pain management and responsiveness to patients’ needs. The measures also include whether a patient would recommend the hospital to friends or family.

“Our analysis reveals that patient safety is strongly associated with high quality care, so it is vitally important to choose a hospital that performs well on these key indicators,” said Evan Marks, Chief Strategy Officer, Healthgrades. “In addition, we found that consumers are increasingly using patient experience and satisfaction as measures to both evaluate hospitals and select where they want to obtain care; so hospitals need to listen to patients about what matters most in driving patient evaluations of their hospital.”

In addition, Healthgrades also has released a new infographic that identifies key observations regarding patient safety and experience. Their findings include:

  • Four types of events make up nearly 75 percent of all patient safety events reported by hospitals. These are: accidental cut, puncture, or hemorrhage; collapsed lung; infections and bed sores.
  • Patient safety recipients are always equally or more likely than non-recipient hospitals to have superior outcomes in specialty areas. For example, Patient Safety Excellence Award recipients are 5.1 times more likely to receive a Specialty Excellence Award for spinal surgery; 3.4 times more likely for Orthopedics overall and 2.3 times more likely for Pulmonary Care overall.
  • 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.

For more information about Healthgrades, to download a full copy of the report or to get information about hospital and physician quality, visit: www.Healthgrades.com/quality

To find out more about the quality programs and services available at the hospitals of Community Healthcare System, visit comhs.org.