Western Baptist Hospital has been identified in the nation’s top 3 percent for demonstrating the fastest, most consistent improvement over five consecutive years, earning a spot in Thomson Reuters 100 Top Hospitals.^®

The study — Thomson Reuters 100 Top Hospitals^®: Performance Improvement Leaders, 5th Edition — examined the performance of more than 2,800 U.S. hospitals on a variety of clinical, operational and patient safety criteria to identify the 100 winners.

Winners include teaching hospitals, such as Mount Sinai in New York, Duke and Vanderbilt, as well as community hospitals, such as Saint Thomas in Nashville. Six Kentucky hospitals were listed.

“We are honored to be recognized for providing quality care for the people of this region,” said Larry Barton, president and CEO of Western Baptist.

Barton said this recognition follows other prestigious awards – the Commission on Cancer’s Outstanding Achievement Award, the American Heart Association’s Get with the Guidelines award and western Kentucky’s only national accreditation by the Society of Chest Pain Centers – all honoring Western Baptist this year for excellence in healthcare.

“These awards are a testament to the diligent, hard work of our staff in caring for the needs of our patients,” Barton said.

The Thomson Reuters 100 Top Hospitals:

• Had fewer than expected patient deaths and adverse safety events
• Increased expenses only 2.5 percent during the five-year study period, on average
• Reduced average length of stay by nearly a day, despite greater severity of illness

Overall, U.S. hospitals struggled to improve their performance from 2002 to 2006, the period covered by the study, but the winning hospitals illustrate that rapid, across-the-board improvement is attainable, according to Jean Chenoweth, senior vice president for performance improvement and 100 Top Hospitals programs at Thomson Reuters.

The study rated hospitals on patient mortality, medical complications, patient safety, length of stay and use of evidence-based medicine. Researchers evaluated 2,867 short-term, acute care, non-federal hospitals.

The study analyzed publicly available Medicare reports, Medicare Provider Analysis and Review data, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Hospital Compare data set.