HEALTHCARE SYSTEM RANKS AMONG TOP 15 IN NATION

January 27, 2012 (San Diego) -- Alvarado Hospital was recognized as part of the only hospital system in California—Prime Healthcare—named one of the nation’s top 15 by Thomson Reuters, a leading provider of information and solutions to improve the cost and quality of healthcare.

"Our healthcare system excelled even in this elite group,” said Luis Leon, CEO of Alvarado and Paradise Valley hospitals. “We have long been proud of our clinical quality, but now San Diegans can see that the high level of quality care, better survival rates, fewer complications and better patient safety provided to our patients has been validated by an outside source based on federal data.”

 

Researchers from the Thomson Reuters “100 Top Hospitals” program analyzed the clinical quality and efficiency of more than 300 health systems to identify the top 15 in the nation. The study found that regardless of their size, the top health systems shared many of the same qualities, including:

 

 

 

In fact, top health systems had 23% fewer adverse patient safety events than expected and had better adherence to core measures of care than their peers.

 

“This independent comparison of hospital systems shows Prime, with its physicians, as a leader amongst healthcare systems in many of the key areas focused on improving health outcomes and safety in a standardized head to head comparison,” said Dr. Ted Mazer, chief of staff, Alvarado Hospital. “Patients should certainly take these findings into account when choosing where they obtain their hospital-based healthcare services.”

 

Prime Healthcare, which operates 14 hospitals in California and one in Texas, ranked higher than the other 21 health systems in California and the more than 30 other health systems on the West Coast.

 

The study used the 2010 Medicare Provider Analysis and Review (MedPAR) and the CMS Hospital Compare data sets to examine health systems with two or more short-term, general, non-federal hospitals; cardiac and orthopedic hospitals; and critical access hospitals.