Newswise — SEATTLE – (Feb. 25, 2014) – Virginia Mason announced today it has been named one of America’s 100 Best Hospitals, as measured by Healthgrades, a leading online resource for comprehensive information about physicians and hospitals.
With this designation, Virginia Mason ranks among the top 2 percent of U.S. hospitals in 2014. In addition to being the only hospital in Washington to make the top 100 this year, Virginia Mason becomes the first hospital in the state ever to earn the America’s Best Hospitals Award from Healthgrades.
“We are extremely proud of this recognition,” said Virginia Mason Chairman and CEO Gary S. Kaplan, MD. “This achievement is a direct result of the efforts of all who work at Virginia Mason, including our partners at Group Health and Pacific Medical Centers, to provide the highest quality and safest care for our patients.”
To determine the best-performing hospitals based on objective measures of clinical quality, Healthgrades used Medicare inpatient data to evaluate more than 4,500 hospitals nationwide. To make the elite 100 list, hospitals had to perform better than expected in 21 conditions and procedures for four consecutive years.
From 2010 to 2012, the America’s Best award recipients, as a group, had an overall 24.53 percent lower risk-adjusted mortality rate for 19 procedures and conditions where in-hospital mortality was the clinical outcome, compared to other U.S. hospitals. If all hospitals had performed at the level of Virginia Mason and others in the top 100 during that period, Healthgrades determined as many as 160,701 lives potentially could have been saved nationwide.
The America’s Best Hospitals Award is important for consumers. Individuals seeking to understand their options for hospital care can have confidence that award recipients have a commitment to clinical quality and a proven record of superior outcomes.
“Across the nation, hospitals achieve this distinction for providing better-than-expected outcomes across a broad spectrum of conditions and procedures over an extended period of time,” said Evan Marks, executive vice president for informatics and strategy at Healthgrades. The company evaluates performance for nearly every hospital in the nation. No hospital can opt-in or opt-out, and no hospital pays to be evaluated.
In January 2014, Virginia Mason received Healthgrades’ Distinguished Hospital Award for Clinical Excellence™ for the fourth straight year, positioning it to be designated as one of America’s 100 Best Hospitals. To learn more about how Healthgrades determines recipients of the America’s Best Hospitals Award, visit www.healthgrades.com/quality.
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