Schneck Medical Center has extended its five-star rating streak and increased its safety score.
Susan Zabor, vice president of clinical and provider management and chief quality officer for Seymour hospital, shared that positive news during a recent Schneck board of trustees meeting.
The hospital received a five-star rating from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for overall hospital quality, which it has done ever since the Hospital Compare survey was created in December 2002.
Hospital Compare is a consumer-oriented website that provides information on how well hospitals provide recommended care to their patients. This information can help consumers make informed decisions about where to go for health care, according to cms.gov.
The site allows consumers to select multiple hospitals and directly compare performance measure information related to heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia, surgery and other conditions.
The results are organized by general information, survey of patients’ experiences, timely and effective care, complications, readmissions and deaths, use of medical imaging and payment and value of care.
The national star ratings are released twice a year — spring and fall. For the information released in April, Schneck was one of 455 acute care hospitals in the nation and 13 in Indiana receiving five stars. More than 3,000 acute care hospitals received ratings.
“Very happy to see that,” Zabor said.
According to the website, an acute care hospital provides inpatient medical care and other related services for surgery, acute medical conditions or injuries (usually for a short-term illness or condition).
In providing a regional comparison of other hospitals within a 50-mile radius, Zabor said Schneck is one of four receiving five stars for overall hospital quality. The others are Indiana University Health Bedford Hospital, Decatur County Memorial Hospital in Greensburg and Margaret Mary Health in Batesville.
During the recent meeting, Zabor also updated the board on the Leapfrog safety score, which went from C in the fall of 2020 to B this spring.
For 20 years, The Leapfrog Group has collected, analyzed and published hospital data on safety, quality and resource use to push the health care industry forward, according to hospitalsafetygrade.org.
Using up to 27 national performance measures from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Leapfrog Hospital Survey and information from other supplemental data sources, a single letter grade is produced, representing a hospital’s overall performance in keeping patients safe from preventable harm and medical errors.
The scores are assigned to more than 2,700 general acute care hospitals across the nation twice annually, and the safety grade is becoming the gold standard measure of patient safety.
“I’m happy to say that (recently) I submitted that for this year’s reporting season. It was a doozy is all I’m going to say,” Zabor said. “It took a lot of time, but also, it was interesting as I was filling it out, I saw many opportunities for improvement that we could implement through strategic initiatives, so that was exciting for me.”
Within a 50-mile radius, Schneck was joined by three other acute care hospitals — Johnson Memorial Hospital in Franklin, Baptist Health Floyd in New Albany and Franciscan Health Indianapolis — with a B grade. Indiana University Health Bloomington Hospital, Norton Brownsboro Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky, and Franciscan Health Mooresville all received A’s.
Zabor said Schneck’s bump up in a grade was based on the C. diff infection score going from 0.379 to 0.192 and surgical site infection after colon surgery score going from 0.653 to 0.
“It was literally the movement of those two measures that moved us from a C to a B,” she said.
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For information, visit cms.gov or hospitalsafetygrade.org.
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