Sacred Heart Hospital on the Emerald Coast Named One of the Nation’s 100 Top Hospitals

Sacred Heart Hospital on the Emerald Coast has been named one of the nation’s 100 Top Hospitals for the third year in a row and the fourth time since opening in 2003. Truven Health Analytics, formerly Thomson Reuters, is a leading provider of information and solutions to improve the cost and quality of healthcare.

The Truven Health 100 Top Hospitals® study identifies hospitals and leadership teams that provide the highest level of value to their communities, based on a national balanced scorecard. The 100 Top Hospitals scorecard measures hospital performance across 10 areas: mortality; inpatient complications; patient safety; average patient stay; expenses; profitability; patient satisfaction; adherence to clinical standards of care; and post-discharge mortality and readmission rates for acute myocardial infarction (heart attack), heart failure, and pneumonia. The study has been conducted annually since 1993. Sacred Heart Hospital on the Emerald Coast was also recognized as one of the top 100 hospitals in 2008, 2012 and 2013. 

“It is an incredible accomplishment to be recognized as one of the 100 Top Hospitals in the nation for the fourth time in 11 years,” said Roger Hall, President of Sacred Heart Hospital on the Emerald Coast. “We thank our associates, medical staff, Board of Trustees, volunteers, our community and the entire Sacred Heart Health System for their dedication, vision, and support to make this another successful step in our healthcare journey.”

To conduct the 100 Top Hospitals study, Truven Health researchers evaluated nearly 3,000 short-term, acute-care, non-federal hospitals. They used public information — Medicare cost reports, quality measures and patient-satisfaction data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Hospital Compare website. Hospitals do not apply, and winners do not pay to market this honor. The winning hospitals were announced in the March 3 edition of “Modern Healthcare” magazine.

“Employers and payers are increasingly seeking network hospitals that consistently provide demonstrated value — hospitals that deliver higher quality, higher satisfaction and lower cost. The 100 Top Hospitals have been objectively proven to provide high value, and the majority of them have demonstrated year-over-year increased value, as well,” said Jean Chenoweth, Truven Health Analytics senior vice president, 100 Top Hospitals Programs. “The results show 100 Top Hospitals to be strong, well-managed hospitals with consistently high performance. This year, 59 percent of the 2014 100 Top Hospitals were winners last year.”

Truven Health estimates that if all Medicare inpatients received the same level of care as those treated in the award-winning facilities:

• More than 165,000 additional lives could be saved.
• Nearly 90,000 additional patients could be complication-free.
• $5.4 billion could be saved.
• 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. More information on this study and other 100 Top Hospitals research is available at www.100tophospitals.com.

For more information about Sacred Heart, please visit www.sacredheartemerald.org.