UW Hospital chosen as one of nation’s top hospitals

UW Hospital and Clinics is one of the nation’s top 100 hospitals, according to a new study by Solucient, a company that provides comparative national measurements of cost, quality and performance in health care. Its report, “100 Top Hospitals: National Benchmarks for Success-2004,” lists the 100 hospitals considered top in the nation for superior clinical, operational and financial performance.

Released Feb. 28, the Solucient analysis is based on publicly available data from more than 6,000 acute-care hospitals nationwide. Each hospital in the study was assigned to one of five comparison groups according to bed size, teaching status and residency program involvement. UW Hospital was one of only 15 hospitals, and the only one in Wisconsin, chosen in the category of “major teaching hospitals.”

In the other ranking, UW Hospital was judged one of “50 Exceptional U.S. Hospitals” by the Leapfrog Group, a consortium of large industrial corporations whose focus is on the reduction of hospital errors as one means to reduce health care costs. The Leapfrog Group’s list was published March 1 in the April issue of Consumers Digest, which includes a special report on hospital safety.

Solucient noted that hospitals in the upper Midwest “have taken the lead in setting new national benchmarks” for survival, safety, complication-free care and overall hospital performance. The vice president of clinical informatics at Solucient said that if all acute-care hospitals performed at the same level that the benchmarks do, an additional 66,506 patient stays could be complication-free — with an estimated annual savings of $6.2 billion.

The Solucient study includes nine measures of quality and safety. More information on the research behind the rankings is available at http://www.100tophospitals.com/media/Register.asp.