St. Mark's, Cottonwood rated among top 5% of hospitals

Two Utah hospitals have been recognized for clinical excellence by HealthGrades, which says they are among the top 5 percent of hospitals for overall clinical excellence. Other Utah hospitals were honored in more specialized categories.

Cottonwood Hospital and St. Mark's Hospital were honored by the independent health-care ratings company in an announcement made Monday, putting them in the top 266 nonfederal hospitals out of 4,971 nationwide.

HealthGrades says that patients admitted to the high-performing hospitals they honored are, on average, 28 percent less likely to die in the hospital and 5 percent less likely to suffer a major complication.

It's estimated that if all the hospitals treating patients provided the level of care found at the "distinguished hospitals," 158,264 lives might have been saved and nearly 12,500 post-operative complications avoided over the three years it analyzed.

St. Mark's received specialty nods for critical care, joint replacement surgery and pulmonary care, as well.

Cottonwood Hospital was also honored for excellence in pulmonary care.

Davis Hospital and Medical Center in Layton received two "excellence" designations, including for joint replacement surgery and orthopedics.

Others deemed excellent in various specialties were Valley View Medical Center in Cedar City for joint replacement surgery; Alta View Hospital in Sandy, Dixie Regional Medical Center in St. George, McKay-Dee Hospital Center in Ogden, Mountain West Medical Center in Tooele for pulmonary; and LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City for stroke treatment.

To arrive at its rankings, the study used data on Medicare patients and analyzed nearly 39 million hospitalizations over the years 2003, 2004 and 2005. The 28 percent lower mortality was based on cardiac surgery, angioplasty and stent, heart attack, heart failure, atrial fibrillation, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, community-acquired pneumonia, stroke, abdominal aortic aneurysm repair, bowel obstruction, gastrointestinal bleed, pancreatitis, diabetic acidosis and coma, pulmonary embolism and sepsis.

For those diagnoses, distinguished hospitals had twice the improvement in its hospital complication rate as other hospitals, reducing the number of deaths over the three years by an average of 12 percent.

It also found a 5 percent lower risk of post-operative complications at those hospitals for treatments involving orthopedic and neurosurgery, vascular surgery, prostate surgery and gall bladder surgery.

To qualify for the honor, hospitals had to meet minimum thresholds in terms of number of patients they treat for a condition and offer a range of services of high quality. The mortality numbers were risk adjusted so that hospitals that care for sicker patients would be on even footing with others.

To see the designees or look up where a particular hospital did for any of 26 different procedures, look online at www.healthgrades.com.

---

E-mail: lois@desnews.com