100 Top Hospitals - 2008

Sometimes red is the color of excellence, whether it’s a pair of socks or a line of dots. Like many hospitals, St. Cloud (Minn.) Hospital does a fall-risk assessment on each incoming patient. Those at risk are issued a pair of red slipper-socks. Their room doors have a magnet picturing autumn leaves to further identify them without making them feel stigmatized. There’s a flag on their electronic health record, and both they and their families get individualized instruction on how to avoid falls.
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If you’re searching for the nexus of clinical care and financial performance, you’ve come to the right place. That’s especially true if you don’t want to lose $23,772. That’s the projected average annual loss per hospital starting Oct. 1, when Medicare stops reimbursing hospitals for eight types of medical mistakes.
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Once again, Thomson 100 Top Hospitals: National Benchmarks for Success winners show meaningful differences vs. peers in research performed for Modern Healthcare’s annual 100 Top Hospitals supplement. This time the research shows that the 100 Top Hospitals have significantly widened the gap vs. peers by raising patient safety to a whole new level nationally.
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It’s a classic Catch-22. Hospital coding specialists must rely only on doctor’s notes to determine if a medical condition was present at the time a Medicare patient is admitted to the hospital. But it is often nurses—not doctors—who document that type of information. The present on admission, or POA, designation was rolled out for Medicare claims, beginning in October 2007. The rule specifies that every diagnosis code listed on a bill must be accompanied by a POA code.
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What will be the financial impact of Medicare’s new policy to essentially stop paying the treatment costs of preventable medical complications? Just think about a pipe leak that begins with a trickle of water that, if ignored, grows into a gusher.In a new study from Thomson Reuters Corp.’s healthcare business, formerly known as Solucient, researchers concluded that the hospital industry could lose at least $91 million annually as a result of Medicare’s plan to remove selected hospital-acquired conditions from calculations to determine payment rates.
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When it comes down to performance, what separates the country’s top hospitals from average performers could be their compulsive behavior around quality initiatives, data collection and analysis.
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A Special Feature on Thomson Reuters' ranking of the 100 best hospitals from 2007. Hospitals are ranked by size in two categories: teaching and community. Source: Thomson Reuters. Published March 17, 2008. This list includes the following data points:Major teaching hospitals: Hospital name, location and number of years on the listTeaching hospitals (200 or more acute-care beds): Hospital name, location and number of years on the list
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When William Ferniany took over as head of the hospital and clinics at the University of Mississippi Medical Center 18 months ago, he executed a classic turnaround formula: Cut costs, increase revenue and improve quality.It worked. The goal was to identify $67 million in annual cost cuts and new revenue by year-end 2008. So far, these have included
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