Solucient 100 Top Hospitals

Benchmarks for Success study:

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100 Top Hospitals:
Benchmarks for Success Study — 1998

Methodology

The data used in the 100 Top Hospitals study come from HCIA’s hospital and DRG databases. The hospital database contains more than 800 data elements for more than 6,000 acute care and specialty hospitals. Virtually every general acute care hospital with 25 or more beds in service is included in the database, as well as all hospitals with bonds rated by Standard & Poor’s Corporation. The primary source of these data is the Medicare cost report, which is filed annually by every U.S. hospital that participates in the Medicare program.

Performance Measures:

Each year we update our selection methodology to reflect changes in the hospital operating environment. This year’s changes include:

Increasing the Risk-Adjusted Mortality and Complication Indices from a one-year to a two-year sample. This change will reward hospitals that have been consistently outperforming their peer over the years and prevent the study from being skewed by hospitals that had just one unusually successful year.
Removing two-year growth as a ranking in the Outpatient performance measure. This change reflects the fact that this is a slowing trend in the hospital market.
Eliminating the Long-Term Growth in Equity measure because of the increasing inconsistency in how hospitals report the elements that comprise it.

The result is a group of eight measures of clinical quality practices, operations, and financial management that we believe constitutes the most reliable, scientific way possible to produce benchmarks for superior hospital performance.

Comparison Groups:

Small Hospitals, 25-99 acute care beds in service: 1,353 hospitals

Medium Hospitals, 100-249 acute care beds in service: 1,230 hospitals

Large Community Hospitals, 250 or more acute care beds in service: 245 hospitals

Teaching Hospitals, 250 or more acute care beds in service and at least 5 interns/residents or an intern/resident-per-bed ratio between 0.01 and 0.24: 331hospitals

Major Teaching Hospitals, 400 or more acute care beds in service and an intern/resident-per-bed ratio of at least 0.25: 99 hospitals

Data from the Medicare cost report are used in calculating all the financial measures for this study. Data used in calculating the three clinical measures for this study — mortality, complications, and length of stay — are from HCIA’s MedPAR database. This database contains information on the nearly 12 million Medicare patients who were discharged from the nation’s acute care facilities during federal fiscal year 1997.

Medicare patients represent 43 percent of hospital revenues at the average facility included in the 100 Top Hospitals study group.

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