For the past decade, Solucient has consistently identified benchmark practices by using solely objective statistical analyses of public data sources, and by constantly improving and refining the study performance measures, thresholds for inclusion, and methodologies.

In developing the multi-year trending tool used for this study, we devised a methodology that we feel removes the bias that could diminish our ability to highlight true data trends. Ensuring consistent methodologies over time gives us a quantitatively rigorous and correct methodology for tracking multi-year changes.

The Study Universe

The data used in the 100 Top Hospitals study come from Solucient's hospital database and the publicly available MedPAR (Medicare Provider Analysis and Review) data set. Data from the hospital database are used in calculating all the financial measures for this study. This database contains more than 800 data elements for over 6,000 U.S. acute care and specialty hospitals. Data used in calculating mortality, complications, length of stay and the coding specificity rate are from the MedPAR data set, which contains information on the more than 12 million Medicare discharges from the nation's acute care hospitals annually. The data in this study are from federal fiscal years 1999 through 2003.

The Comparison Groups

Bed size, teaching status, and residency program involvement have a profound effect on the types of patients a hospital treats and the scope of services it provides. We assign each hospital to one of five peer groups according to its size and teaching status:

• Major Teaching Hospitals
• Teaching Hospitals
• Large Community Hospitals
• Medium Community Hospitals
• Small Community Hospitals
  

The Performance Measures

Our methodology brings together a group of nine measures of clinical quality practice, operations, and financial management that we believe constitutes the most reliable, scientific way possible to produce benchmarks for superior hospital performance. We also believe that the use of publicly available data supports this goal.

The nine measures are: