The Premier healthcare alliance has singled out 23 hospitals as the top in the country for their commitment to high-quality patient care and operational efficiency. Several of the criteria Premier used to gauge performance have information technology underpinnings.

Premier chose the hospitals from more than 3,796 eligible hospitals nationwide, at Premier’s annual Breakthroughs Conference and Exhibition in Anaheim, Calif. 

Premier is composed of more than 2,100 U.S. hospitals and more than 58,999 other healthcare sites that have joined together to boost care, while cutting costs.
 
Premier’s Award for Quality recognizes leading healthcare organizations that efficiently provide outstanding patient care and consistently set the standard in clinical excellence nationwide.

Distinguished by its consideration of performance-based criteria, including clinical quality outcomes, resource utilization, and clinical process indicators, Premier measures top performers at the overall hospital level.
 
“The Award for Quality honors the efforts of our nation’s leading hospitals to provide superior quality and operational efficiency,” said Susan DeVore, Premier incoming president and CEO. “We’re thrilled to celebrate the efforts of these facilities as they improve the health of the communities they serve.”
 
Premier considered all acute care inpatient facilities in the United States that submitted data to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the CMS Hospital Compare project. Using MedPar 2007 data, quality and efficiency indexes were calculated for 62 disease groups and at the overall hospital level.

Quality was measured by the incidence of three adverse outcomes: mortality, morbidity and complications, which are combined into a single quality index using the preference weightings from the Corporate Hospital Rating Project. The efficiency index was generated using length of stay to proxy for resource utilization.
 
Acute care facilities attaining the top 1 percent designation are identified as having scores in the top two quintiles for process of care and in 10 out of 62 disease groups and at the overall hospital level for quality and efficiency. Additionally, hospitals had measures for quality and efficiency that were equal to or exceeded expected outcomes.

List of 2009 Award for Quality winners on next page...