Prestigious study ranks St. Francis-Indianapolis among nation’s ‘100 Top Hospitals’

INDIANAPOLIS – The Thomson Reuters 100 Top Hospitals® National Benchmarks study has rated St. Francis Hospital-Indianapolis highly for its overall organization performance for 2009.

The study, which has been conducted annually since 1993, evaluates performance in 10 areas: mortality, medical complications, patient safety, average length of stay, expenses, profitability, patient satisfaction, adherence to clinical standards of care, and post-discharge mortality and readmission rates for acute myocardial infarction, heart failure, and pneumonia.

This marked the second straight year St. Francis made the Thomson Reuters list.

“We are continually looking at ways to improve our performance to better serve our patients at all of our hospitals,” said Robert J. Brody, president and chief executive officer. “We’re honored to be recognized by Thomson Reuters.”

St. Francis, which also operates hospitals in Beech Grove and Mooresville, was one of only five hospitals in Indiana recognized in the study.

“This year’s study magnified the value that 100 Top Hospital award winners provide to their communities. Even during the economic downturn, the 100 Top Hospitals maintained a profit from operations while raising the bar for clinical quality and patient satisfaction,” said Jean Chenoweth, senior vice president for performance improvement and 100 Top Hospitals programs at Thomson Reuters. “The insistence of these hospitals’ leaders — their boards, executive teams and medical staffs — on overall excellence makes the difference.”

To conduct the 100 Top Hospitals study, Thomson Reuters researchers evaluated 2,926 short-term, acute care, non-federal hospitals. They used public information — Medicare cost reports, Medicare Provider Analysis and Review (MedPAR) data, and core measures and patient satisfaction data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Hospital Compare data set.

According to the study, if all Medicare inpatients received the same level of care as those treated in these 100 Top Hospitals award winners:

More than 98,000 additional patients would survive each year
More than 197,000 patient complications would be avoided annually.
Expenses would decline by an aggregate $5.5 billion a year
The average patient stay would decrease by nearly half a day.
If the same standards were applied to all inpatients, the impact would be even greater.

To learn more about the study and to see the 100 Top Hospitals, go to www.100tophospitals.com.