NMC Rated a Top 100 Hospital

Northwest Medical Center (NMC) was named one of the nation’s 100 Top Hospitals® on March 17th by Thomson Healthcare, a leading provider of information and solutions to improve the cost and quality of healthcare. The award recognizes hospitals that have achieved excellence in clinical outcomes, patient safety, financial performance, and efficiency. This is the fourth time Northwest Medical Center has been recognized with this honor.

The 2007 Thomson 100 Top Hospitals: National Benchmarks for Success study appears in the March 17 edition of Modern Healthcare magazine.

“I would like to congratulate our employees and medical staff who have earned this prestigious designation for us,” says Paul Kappelman, NMC Chief Executive Officer. “We strive every day to make Northwest Medical Center the hospital of choice for our patients.”

Northwest Medical Center is a 300-bed hospital offering a full-range of healthcare services including Emergency Department, Cardiac Care, Neurology, Neurosurgery, Outpatient Imaging, Oncology, Bariatric Surgery, Orthopedic Surgery, minimally invasive surgical suites and a free-standing Women’s Center, two urgent care facilities and Lazos de Familia clinic.

According to the study, the highest performance levels in patient safety were achieved by the 100 hospitals in the study that delivered the highest balanced performance across quality, efficiency, and financial stability. If all hospitals had performed at the level of these leading hospitals on the eight patient safety measures studied, they would have saved $253 million and 7,914 lives during the time period the study examined.

“Employers, health plans, and hospitals need to take note that we have entered a new phase in driving transformation of the healthcare industry,” said Jean Chenoweth, senior vice president in the Center for Healthcare Improvement at Thomson Healthcare. “Hospitals setting new levels of patient safety are those with the highest balanced scores across quality, efficiency, and financial performance.”

The 15th edition of the Thomson 100 Top Hospitals: National Benchmarks for Success study uses a balanced scorecard approach and scores hospitals according to eight key organization-wide measures: risk-adjusted mortality, risk-adjusted complications, patient safety composite, average core measures scores, severity-adjusted average length of stay, expense per adjusted discharge, profit from operations, and cash-to-debt ratio.

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