LGH on America’s 100 Top Hospitals list for seventh time in nine years

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Lancaster General Hospital was selected as one of the nation's 100 Top Hospitals for 2005 by Solucient, the leading source of healthcare business intelligence.

This is the seventh time LGH has been honored in the last nine years, an achievement shared by only a handful of hospitals across the nation.

Now in its 13th year, the 100 Top Hospitals: National Benchmark for Success Study recognizes institutions that demonstrate superior clinical, operational and financial performance in overall service.

Through rigorous evaluation of information by Solucient’s physicians and statisticians, the company compares the performance of hospitals nationwide, using objective data in five critical areas: clinical outcomes, patient safety, operational efficiency, financial stability and growth.

The Solucient study is significant because its research data comes from Medicare records and includes thousands of the nation’s hospitals.

Lancaster General is one of only four Pennsylvania hospitals to appear on the 2005 list, published in the Feb. 27 edition of Modern Healthcare magazine. It is the only Lancaster County hospital to have ever appeared on the 100 Top Hospitals: National Benchmarks for Success listing.

“The fact that Lancaster General Hospital is consistently among the nation’s top hospitals is the result of a constant pursuit of excellence by the entire organization. You play a part in a continual display of teamwork which makes Lancaster General Hospital a wonderful place to work and practice medicine,” Thomas Beeman, President and CEO of Lancaster General, and Marion McGowan, Executive Vice President and COO of Lancaster General, wrote in an email message to employees.

The 100 Top Hospitals distinction includes the Lancaster General Hospital, Lancaster General Women & Babies Hospital, Lancaster General Health Campus, and five other outpatient facilities.

The hospital is a keystone of the non-profit Lancaster General health system, which also includes Visiting Nurse Association of Lancaster County and Lancaster General Medical Group, a network of physician practices throughout Lancaster County.

Solucient’s report, available at www.100tophospitals.com, states that if all acute care hospitals performed at the same level as the nation’s top hospitals, an additional 106,312 patients would survive each year; more than 117,000 patient complications would be avoided annually; expenses would decline by an aggregate $7.6+ billion a year; and the average patient stay would decrease by more than half a day.

Winners of the 100 Top Hospitals National award tend to have a higher percentage of patients requiring more complex treatment or admission to the hospital than EDs at non-winners. Benchmark hospitals were approximately 9 percent more likely to have higher complexity or admitted patients from the ED, after adjusting for hospital region and class.

The 100 Top Hospitals have better patient safety as indicated by risk-adjusted Patient Safety Indicator (PSI) rates that were significantly lower than non-winners for nine of the 11 PSIs studied.

Benchmark hospitals were also less likely to experience adverse outcomes, also known as medical injuries, than peer hospitals. The presence of any of adverse result, as defined by the PSI list, significantly and negatively impacted the risk of death, patient length of stay (LOS) and cost per case.

Survival rates were higher at benchmark hospitals (96.9 percent) compared to the typical peer hospital (96.2 percent), translating into tens of thousands of lives saved.

The 100 Top Hospitals treated sicker patients requiring more complex treatment, yet had better patient outcomes and lower costs.