ABOUT THE HEALTH SYSTEM QUALITY/EFFICIENCY BENCHMARKS

This groundbreaking new study identifies the nation's top health systems, using the two most recent years of data to assess the clinical quality and efficiency of the hospitals within a system.

Findings

The top health systems are providing higher quality care, with fewer mortalities and patient complications and better adherence to patient safety standards and core measures of care. They are also treating patients more efficiently, with substantially shorter patient stays.

Based on the results of this study, we estimate that if all Medicare inpatients received the same level of care as those in the 100 Top Health Systems-winning hospitals:

  • More than 47,000 additional patients would survive each year.
  • Nearly 92,000 patient complications would be avoided annually.
  • The average patient stay would decrease by more than half a day.
If the same standards were applied to all inpatients, the impact would be even greater.

Methods

This is a quantitative study that identifies 10 health systems with the highest level of achievement on a modified, clinical and efficiency version of the 100 Top Hospitals Balanced Scorecard.

Data Sources: The study uses two primary sources of data: the publicly available Medicare Provider Analysis and Review (MedPAR) data set and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Hospital Compare data set. We used the most recent two federal fiscal years of data available, 2006 and 2007.

The main steps we take in selecting the top 10 Health Systems are:
  • Building the database of hospitals, including special selection and exclusion criteria.This study focuses on short-term, acute care, non-federal U.S. hospitals that treat a broad spectrum of patients.
  • Identifying which hospitals are members of health systems. To be included, a health system must have at least two short-term general acute care hospitals, as identified using the 100 Top hospitals specialty algorithm. After applying hospital exclusions, 252 hospitals were included.
  • Scoring systems on a set of performance measures using a methodology that aggregates hospital-level data to the system level and accounts for hospital size and teaching status. The measures we used for this study were:
    1. Risk-adjusted mortality index
    2. Risk-adjusted complications index
    3. Risk-adjusted patient safety index
    4. Core measures mean percent
    5. Severity-adjusted average length of stay
  • Determining 10 top performers by ranking health systems on their aggregate performance measure scores

For full details, download the 100 Top Hospitals: Health Systems Quality/Efficiency study white paper

For more information, email the 100 Top Hospitals Coordinator at healthcare.pubs@thomsonreuters.com or call us at (800) 568-3282 (option #3).

RELATED LINKS

Find out more about the Thomson Reuters 100 Top Hospitals.