Schneck Medical Center (Seymour, IN) Named 2011 Baldrige Award Recipient

Schneck Medical Center of Seymour, Indiana, was named a 2011 Baldrige Award Recipient in the Healthcare Category. Schneck is the first organization from Indiana to receive the Baldrige Award.

Until recently, Indiana did not have a State level Baldrige-based award program. Schneck thus partnered with the Ohio Partnership for Excellence. The Ohio program has since expanded its scope and now covers the State of Indiana (as well as West Virginia). The program has now been renamed The Partnership for Excellence.

The press release announcing the other Baldrige Award winners can be found here.

The profile of Schneck Medical Center released with the announcement can be found here.

Below are excerpts from the profile of Schneck Medical Center outlining its quality performance that may be interesting to the healthcare quality professional. Note that the 50 page Baldrige application from Schneck will become public domain in a few months and thus awailable for public examination and learning. Schneck (as required by all Baldrige award winners) will also be participating in national and regional conferences where they will be sharing thier Baldrige journey.

• SMC consistently demonstrates high levels of performance in relation to patient-focused health care measures. Specifically, on 17 of 22 core measures reported for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), SMC scored 100 percent in the second quarter of 2011.
• SMC ranked second among 94 hospitals in its geographic region and outperformed all local competitors when measured for its value-based purchasing (VBP). VBP is a method that holds health care providers accountable for the quality and cost of their services through a system of rewards and consequences. Incentives discourage inappropriate, unnecessary, and costly care.
• Patient satisfaction surveys reflect SMC’s year-to-year favorable performance, meeting or exceeding top 10 percent or top 25 percent levels on nine of 10 Press Ganey (a national consulting firm focused on improving health care performance) measures, including inpatient quality of care, inpatient family support, inpatient coordination of care, and inpatient customer service. On measures of ambulatory care, including timeliness, customer service, and ambulatory education, SMC’s performance exceeds the top 25 percent level.
• SMC’s commitment to a “Patient First” culture has led to many innovative health care options. For example, to address its limited treatment options for myocardial infarctions, SMC and its largest competitor, located 25 miles away, created a collaborative initiative for coordinated handoffs of patients needing emergency cardiac catheterizations. Through this effort, “door-to-balloon” times (the critical period for assessing and diagnosing a heart attack and delivering the needed intervention) have been reduced from 120 to as low as 60 minutes, ensuring patients get the best and quickest treatment.
• SMC has achieved high performance levels in all areas measured by the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems, with SMC outperforming its Indiana peers from 2008 to 2011 (year-to-date) in the areas related to the ability of nurses and physicians to listen, understand, and provide clear discharge instructions.
• SMC demonstrates role-model performance through its low overall rates of hospital-acquired infections, which have been maintained at or below 1 percent since 2008. There have been no occurrences of postoperative infections from bariatric surgeries, one of SMC’s focus areas. No patient has acquired ventilator-associated pneumonia since 2009, while central line-associated bloodstream infections have remained at low numbers since 2008, with zero cases in 2011 (year-to-date).
• SMC demonstrates excellence in measures of its operating margin, cash flow, and cash position, with its reported results comparing favorably to the Standard & Poor’s (S&P) “A-” and “AA” rated median levels. From 2008 to 2010, SMC’s gross revenue results showed growth in the organization’s strategic focus areas—women’s health, joint replacement, noninvasive cardiac care, cancer care, and bariatric surgery.