Doylestown Hospital Named One of Best Nationwide

Doylestown Hospital is one of the 100 best hospitals in the United States, according to the Thomson Reuters 100 Top Hospitals study released this week.

The annual study evaluated nearly 3,000 acute care hospitals and health systems nationwide based on their overall clinical performance.

"The Thomson Reuters 100 Top Hospital rating is a wonderful affirmation of the quality of care Doylestown Hospital consistently delivers, and the culture of patient safety that we all have worked so hard to achieve," Doylestown Hospital President and CEO Richard Reif said in a statement Friday.

"For the past two decades, we have been refining and redesigning hospital systems to be on the leading edge of best practices in medicine," Reif continued. "At the same time the V.I.A. (the women’s organization that founded and still owns the hospital today) has had the foresight and determination to support serious investments in the hospital’s future. I could not be more proud of, or excited for, each and every associate, hospital volunteer and member of our medical staff.”

The Thomson Reuters 100 Top Hospitals study evaluates performance in 10 areas:

• mortality
• medical complications
• patient safety (e.g. infection rates, absence of medication errors)
• average patient length of stay
• cost of providing care
• profitability
• patient satisfaction
• adherence to clinical standards of care (best practices)
• post-discharge mortality
• and readmission rates for patients with acute myocardial infarction (heart attack), heart failure, and pneumonia.

According to Dr. Scott Levy, the hospital’s chief medical officer, “Our objective has always been to provide the best possible care for our community–we never consider specific awards in and of themselves as a goal of the hospital. However, it is extremely gratifying to receive this national recognition and we consider this an extraordinary achievement for our organization.”

The nursing staff of Doylestown Hospital also takes tremendous pride in the recognition, according to Eleanor Wilson, RN, the hospital’s chief operating officer.

“We view this recognition, along with the many other national awards we have received, as part of our ‘Report Card. It confirms that we are doing the right things to help people and our patients are extremely happy with the care we are providing. The Nursing staff contributes significantly to both excellent patient outcomes and patient satisfaction. We are very proud of this accomplishment,” Wilson said.

In November 2011, Doylestown Hospital was recognized by Thomson Reuters as one of the Top 50 Cardiovascular Hospitals in the nation for 2012. 

That news came on the heels of another national recognition for Doylestown Hospital: the hospital’s 30-day mortality rate for heart attack and was best of any hospital in the state of Pennsylvania according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services at its HospitalCompare web site (August 2011).

To conduct the 100 Top Hospitals study, Thomson Reuters researchers evaluated 2,886 short-term, acute care, non-federal hospitals. They used public information — Medicare cost reports, Medicare Provider Analysis and Review (MedPAR) data, and core measures and patient satisfaction data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Hospital Compare website.

The winning hospitals were announced on April 16. Hospitals do not apply, and winners do not pay to market this honor.

Based on comparisons between the study winners and a peer group of similar high-volume hospitals, the study found that if all hospitals performed at the level of this year’s winners:

• More than 186,000 additional lives could be saved.
• Approximately 56,000 additional patients could be complication-free.
• More than $4.3 billion could be saved.
• The average patient stay would decrease by nearly half a day.

This analysis was based on the Medicare patients included in this study. If the same standards were applied to all inpatients, the impact would be even greater.

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

About Doylestown Hospital

Doylestown Hospital is a comprehensive 238-bed medical center serving families throughout Bucks and Montgomery Counties and Western New Jersey.

Doylestown Hospital's Medical Staff includes more than 400 physicians in 40 specialty areas. The Heart Institute of Doylestown Hospital is a regional center of excellence for cardiology and cardiac surgery. The Cancer Institute of Doylestown Hospital and Penn Radiation Oncology at Doylestown offer comprehensive cancer treatment in an integrated environment. Other areas of clinical emphasis include emergency medicine, maternal-child health, orthopedics, interventional radiology, gastroenterology, urology, general surgery and robotic surgery.