Rockford Memorial Hospital was identified as a recipient of the 2009 HealthGrades Patient Safety Excellence Award™. The top five percent of all hospitals in the U.S. were recognized with this award in a report, issued today by the leading independent healthcare ratings organization.
Rockford Memorial Hospital is the only hospital in the city of Rockford to receive the award, and has been recognized for patient safety excellence on a national basis by HealthGrades during the past three consecutive years (2007-2009).
National Statistics
If all hospitals performed at the level of Patient Safety Excellence Award™ recipients, approximately 211,697 patient safety events and 22,771 Medicare deaths could have been avoided while saving the U.S. approximately $2.0 billion from 2005 through 2007.
During the course of the HealthGrades study, eight patient safety indicators showed improvement, while seven worsened, across all hospitals nationwide. The overall incidence rate remained virtually unchanged compared to last year’s study.
Between 2005 and 2007, 913,215 total patient safety events were recorded among Medicare beneficiaries, which represents 2.3 percent of the nearly 38 million Medicare hospitalizations. This equates to one reported patient safety event every 1.7 minutes.
The Study
The sixth annual HealthGrades Patient Safety in American Hospitals Study applies methodology developed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to identify the incident rates of 15 patient safety indicators among Medicare patients at virtually all of the nation's nearly 5,000 nonfederal hospitals.
Additionally, HealthGrades applied its methodology using 12 patient safety indicators to identify the best-performing hospitals, or Patient Safety Excellence Award™ Hospitals, which represent the top five percent of all U.S. hospitals. HealthGrades developed this award to give patients more information about choosing a hospital.