Ind. hospital included in top 50

 America’s 50 Best Hospitals for 2009 have been calculated, and Indiana is home to one of them.

The honor went to the Community Hospital in Munster, across the state border from Chicago, according to the HealthGrades health care rating organization.

The proximity “makes us more proud of our designation,” said Marie Forszt, director of marketing at Community, because there are so many well-funded teaching hospitals in the Chicago area.

Three of the top 50 are located in Chicago, Forszt said.

This is the second year that Community has received the honor, which is primarily because of its excellent doctors, nurses and clinical ancillary staff, Forszt said.

The hospital also invests in the most up-to-date medical technology possible, she said.

HealthGrades also gives one-to-five star ratings for hospitals across the country in various areas. In Indianapolis, St. Vincent Indianapolis Hospital is not only five-star in several categories – including pulmonary, women’s health and cardiac – it also received awards of its own from HealthGrades this year, such as the Distinguished Hospital Award for Clinical Excellence (DHA-CE) and the Women’s Health Excellence Award (WHEA). The hospital also won accolades this year for its excellent stroke, gastrointestinal, critical care and coronary intervention rates.

The IU Medical Center in Indianapolis also won both the DHA-CE and the WHEA.
St. Francis Hospital and Health Centers in Indianapolis, Beech Grove and Mooresville received five stars for its gastrointestinal and joint replacement programs. St. Francis also won an Outstanding Patient Experience Award.

“None of it happens incidentally,” said Kelli Searles, director of community relations and marketing. “Everybody at every level has to be involved in quality programs.”

For hip and knee replacement, St. Francis is among the top five percent in the United States for positive outcomes, because of the hospital’s strict measures to educate patients and prevent infection before, during and after a surgery.

A hospital had to receive star ratings in at least 19 of the 26 HealthGrades procedures and diagnoses to be considered for HealthGrades DHA-CE, according to the HealthGrades Web site.

Factors include complications, in-house mortality, 30-day mortality or 180-day mortality for 27 different “service lines,” Forszt said.

“They’re looking at mortality and morbidity, so death and complications,” Searles said.

The site gets data from nearly 5,000 hospitals, Searles said, using only information on Medicare patients.

“That kind of levels the playing field,” Forszt said, because all the records compared are for patients in the same age range.

Bloomington Hospital is not a DHA-CE recipient, nor did it receive any other HealthGrades awards. While it did earn a few five-star ratings, the majority of procedures have three- or one-star ratings, three meaning “as expected” and one denoting “poor” based on statistical analysis by HealthGrades.