DENVER--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Healthgrades, the leading online resource for comprehensive information about physicians and hospitals, today announced the recipients of the 2015 Healthgrades Patient Safety Excellence Award™ and the 2015 Healthgrades Outstanding Patient Experience Award™.
For the two awards, Healthgrades evaluated patient experience by applying a scoring methodology to 10 patient experience measures data supplied by the HCHAPS survey of patients’ perspectives of their hospital care. Patient safety was evaluated utilizing claims data from the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS), and the application of software and patient safety incidents as defined by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).
In addition, the company released a related white paper entitled, “Asking the Right Questions to Improve Patient Experience and Safety” that identifies key observations involving award recipients.
The white paper explores the following questions:
1. How have the measurable elements of patient experience and their relationship to the “overall satisfaction” question and “likelihood to recommend” changed over time?
2. What differences in patient experience responses exist when factoring in geography or hospital type?
3. Are there areas where patient safety incidents are more likely to occur so focused efforts can be made to prevent them?
Important findings include:
- Questions that once had high correlation with the “likelihood to recommend” responses (receiving help as soon as they wanted) are no longer highly correlated whereas others have taken their place (received information about care after discharge).
- Specific experience measures that have high correlation to the overall score given by the patient vary by region and by hospital type.
- Overall all the experience measures have a declining strength of relationship to the “likelihood to recommend” and the overall rating responses.
These findings, both in overall trends and the application of the regional and hospital type differences, suggest the experience measures themselves should be re-evaluated and updated.
In terms of patient safety, Healthgrades found that Patient Safety Award recipients all performed higher in clinical outcomes than non-recipients for all the conditions and procedures evaluated. In addition, the analysis shows the majority of incidents are concentrated into a subset of PSIs and specifically concentrated into a small number of conditions and procedures.
“In the area of patient experience, our white paper suggests that hospitals need to better understand shifting drivers of satisfaction in diverse patient populations across different hospital settings,” said Evan Marks, Chief Strategy Officer. “With regard to patient safety, the Healthgrades report found that since 75% of incidents reported by all hospitals were concentrated within seven conditions/procedures, hospitals should focus their evaluation and preventive measures within these cohorts, streamlining their efforts for maximum results.”
2015 Healthgrades Outstanding Patient Experience Award™
There were 452 hospitals that achieved the 2015 Healthgrades Outstanding Patient Experience Award™, distinguished as the top 15% of hospitals nationally, based on how their own patients responded to the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey for visits occurring between January and December of 2013.
2015 Healthgrades Patient Safety Excellence Award™
In 2015, there were 467 hospitals across the nation that achieved the Healthgrades Patient Safety Excellence Award™. The distinction places this elite group of hospitals within the top 10% of all hospitals evaluated for their excellent performance in safeguarding patients from serious, potentially preventable complications during their hospital stays.
From 2011 through 2013, there were: 278,262 potentially preventable patient safety events among Medicare patients in U.S. hospitals. From 2011 through 2013, if all hospitals, as a group, performed similarly to hospitals performing better than expected on each of 13 Patient Safety Indicators evaluated by Healthgrades, on average, 133,896 patient safety events could have been avoided.1
“We congratulate all 2015 recipients for their considerable achievement and outstanding performance in the areas of patient safety and patient experience,” continued Mr. Marks.
About Healthgrades
Healthgrades, headquartered in Denver, Colorado, is the leading online resource for comprehensive information about physicians and hospitals. Today, more than one million people a day use the Healthgrades websites to search, compare and connect with hospitals and physicians based on the most important measures when selecting a healthcare provider: experience, hospital quality and patient satisfaction. For more information about Healthgrades, visit http://www.healthgrades.com or download the Healthgrades iPhone app.
1 Statistics are based on Healthgrades Patient Safety Ratings and Excellence Award methodology which includes application of AHRQ QI software (Version 4.6A) to MedPAR data for years 2011 through 2013 and represent 3-year estimates for Medicare patients only.
