News

Beebe Medical Center Receives National Quality Award for Orthopaedic Care

10/14/08

Beebe Medical Center today announced that it is ranked among the top ten percent of all hospitals in the nation, resulting in an Orthopedic Excellence Award for the quality of its orthopedic care by HealthGrades, the leading independent healthcare ratings company.

Beebe Medical Center is the only hospital in the Delmarva Peninsula to receive the Orthopedic Excellence Award and is ranked best in the state of Delaware and in all of the Delmarva Peninsula for overall orthopedic care for the third year in a row. Beebe Medical Center also received five-star ratings for joint replacement, total knee replacement and hip fracture repair.

We are honored to have earned this recognition from HealthGrades, and we are extremely proud of our orthopaedic team, said Jeffery M. Fried, Beebe Medical Center President and CEO. Our goal at Beebe Medical Center is to continually strive to reach and maintain excellence in healthcare. This rating reflects the dedication of everyone in the medical center family - our medical staff, our employees, our board of directors and our volunteers to consistently offer quality healthcare.


As part of the nation's most comprehensive, independent analysis of hospital quality, HealthGrades found that patients treated at five-star rated hospitals for nine common procedures are 47 percent less likely to experience a major complication, such as post-operative infections or heart conditions, which can lengthen their hospital stay and increase costs. According to the study, if all Medicare patients had been treated at a top-performing hospital compared to the lowest-performing hospitals during 2005-07, more than 123,000 major complications potentially could have been avoided.

In 2008, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency that funds medical and surgical care for the majority of hospital patients, announced that it would discontinue payments for many major in hospital complications, including surgery on the wrong body part and post-operative infection or disability due to a contaminated implantation device.

Beebe Medical Center continually focuses on quality and performance improvement. It has ongoing efforts to improve procedures and implement new ones that put quality and patient safety first. This year the hospital enrolled into the American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS NSQIP), an established, outcomes-based program to measure and improve the quality of surgical care. Recently, Beebe Medical Center and its home health arm Beebe Home Health were honored by Quality Insights of Delaware, the state's Medicare quality improvement organization, for outstanding performance in improving the quality of care.

HealthGrades, in developing its 2009 healthcare quality ratings released today, analyzed more than 41 million Medicare hospitalization records from 2005 to 2007 at the nation's approximately 5,000 non-federal hospitals.

Hospitals with outcomes that are above average to a statistically significant degree receive a five-star rating. Hospitals with average outcomes receive a three-star rating, and hospitals with outcomes that are below average receive a one-star rating. Because no two hospitals or their patients' risk profiles are alike, HealthGrades employs extensive risk-adjustment algorithms to ensure that it is making analogous comparisons.

On its Web site, www.healthgrades.com, HealthGrades offers consumers free quality ratings of 26 procedures and treatments. The Web site is designed so that consumers can easily compare patient outcomes at their local hospitals for procedures ranging from total knee surgery to treatment of heart attacks. Each hospital receives a star rating based on its patient outcomes in terms of mortality or complication rates for each procedure or treatment. For example, complications can include hospital-acquired infections, heart and lung difficulties during or after surgery, and excessive bleeding.

Beebe Medical Center is a not-for-profit community medical center with a charitable mission to encourage healthy living, prevent illness, and restore optimal health with the people residing, working, or visiting in the communities we serve. For more information, please visit us online at www.beebemed.org