Bay Area Medical Center named one of the nation’s 100 Top Hospitals® by Solucient (March 3, 2005)

(Marinette, Wis.) – Bay Area Medical Center was named one of the nation’s 100 Top Hospitals® by Solucient, the leading source of healthcare business intelligence.

The award recognizes hospitals that have achieved excellence in quality of care, operational efficiency, financial performance, and adaptation to the environment. This is the first time Bay Area has been recognized with this honor.

The 12th edition of Solucient’s 100 Top Hospitals: National Benchmarks for Success study appears in a special supplement to the February 28th edition of Modern Healthcare magazine.

“Our board, management team, employees, volunteers and medical staff should all feel very proud of the roles they’ve played in achieving this recognition, “ said Bay Area president and CEO David Olson. “It is one more sign that we are doing the right things to realize our vision of becoming a regional medical center.”

Results of the study indicate that hospitals in the Midwestern states have taken the lead in setting new national benchmarks for survival, increased safety, “complication-free” care, and overall hospital operational performance. Across the nation, hospitals as a whole have also improved outcomes and reduced lengths of stay, suggesting that performance improvement efforts are beginning to have a positive impact. In fact, if all acute care hospitals performed at the same level as the nation’s benchmark hospitals, as many as 66,342 more Medicare patients could survive, and an additional 66,506 patient stays could be complication-free each year—at an estimated annual savings of $6.2 billion.

“The new benchmark hospitals have set the bar much higher for patient outcomes, patient safety, operational performance, and improved value for the community,” says Jean Chenoweth, senior vice president of Solucient’s Center for Healthcare Improvement, which is responsible for the 100 Top Hospitals program. “To achieve these new benchmarks, the whole organization—not just one clinical service line—must be aligned to achieve performance improvement goals. The board of trustees, the management team, and the entire hospital and medical staff must align their efforts over years to reach national benchmark levels of performance.”

The National Benchmarks for Success study analyzed acute care hospitals nationwide using publicly available performance data from 2003, including MedPAR data and Medicare cost reports.

Facilities recognized on the list are represented across five hospital classes:

• Major Teaching - 15 winners
• Teaching - 25 winners
• Large Community, 250+ Beds - 20 winners
• Medium Community, 100 to 249 Beds - 20 winners
• Small Community, 25 to 99 Beds - 20 winners

Bay Area was recognized in the Small Community class, which included a total of 1,147 hospitals. The evaluation was based on BAMC’s performance in five critical areas of hospital performance: clinical outcomes, patient safety, operational efficiency, financial results, and service to the community.

“This kind of objective benchmarking allows us to compare our performance with other hospitals across the nation,” Olson commented. “It not only gives us something to celebrate, it will be a valuable tool in identifying areas we need to improve upon.”

Solucient is an information products company that serves the healthcare industry and is based out of Ann Arbor, Michigan. It is a market leader in providing tools and vital insights that healthcare managers can use to improve the performance of their organizations.

More information on this study and other 100 Top Hospitals research is available at www.100tophospitals.com.