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This nationally recognized award honors
clinical excellence in both quality of care and operational
efficiency, differentiating its winners as industry leaders that
deliver outstanding patient care while reducing the cost of health
care by improving resource utilization.
"Better health are through better
use of information and resources is what distinguishes Premier Award
for Quality winners from their peers," says Stephanie Alexander,
senior vice president and general manager of Premier Healthcare
Informatics. "These hospitals, big and small, are leading the
industry, using best practices and evidence-based decision-making to
develop more efficient ways to deliver excellent patient care."
"Our employees seek better ways to
improve patient care each and every day," said Kathleen Vipond, ALMH
assistant administrator and director of professional services. "This
award is evidence of our success in developing more efficient ways
of delivering excellent care to our patients."
ALMH and its two Memorial Health
System affiliate hospitals -- Memorial Medical Center of Springfield
and St. Vincent Memorial Hospital of Taylorville -- were the first
hospitals in the nation to sign up for this groundbreaking program.
Using standardized administrative, clinical and financial data
submitted by hospitals on a regular basis, Premier measures clinical
quality outcomes, clinical process indicators and resource
utilization outcomes. These risk-adjusted indicators are then
examined to identify best performers in five key clinical areas:
heart bypass surgery, heart failure, heart attack,
community-acquired pneumonia, and hip and knee replacements.
Memorial Medical Center was also
honored with a Premier Award for Quality in the area of hip and knee
replacements. ALMH and Memorial were the only Illinois hospitals
recognized among the 32 hospitals across the nation to receive
awards from Premier.
Vipond and Dr. Melissa Hardiek of
Lincoln Healthcare Specialists, whose leadership of the Clinical
Effectiveness Committee greatly contributed to ALMH's success in the
category of heart failure management, accepted the award May 18 on
behalf of the hospital at Premier's annual Breakthroughs Conference
and Exhibition in Las Vegas.
"We are pleased to receive this
honor in recognition of months of diligence, but we are by no means
going to stop our pursuit of providing better quality health are for
the people and communities we serve," said Woody Hester, ALMH
president and chief executive officer. "At ALMH, and throughout the
health system, we continuously strive for excellence and firmly
believe there is always room for improvement."
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 In 2003, Premier joined with the
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to launch the CMS/Premier
Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration Project. The project tracks
hospital performance on a set of 34 nationally standardized and
widely accepted quality indicators and pays annual incentives to top
performers among participating hospitals.
Only three winners were picked in
each category for each hospital type from the pool of eligible
Premier hospitals. The pool was made up of hospitals that submitted
data to Premier between July 2003 and June 2004. In the area of
heart failure, ALMH was honored along with such prestigious
facilities as Sinai Hospital of Baltimore, Md., and Kettering
Hospital in Ohio. For a complete list of winners, visit
www.premierinc.com/all/quality/award/.
About ALMH
Abraham Lincoln Memorial Hospital is
a community-based general hospital. ALMH strives to be the "Best
Rural Hospital in America" by providing state-of-the-art facilities
for the vast majority of health care needs. ALMH is a 10-year
affiliate of the Memorial Health System of Springfield, whose vision
is to be the leading health care system that people choose over all
others.
For more information on the services
provided, please visit
www.ALMH.org or call (217) 732-2161.
About Premier Healthcare
Informatics
Premier Healthcare Informatics
offers performance measurement, benchmarking and reporting products,
and related advisory services and methodologies to support health
systems' and hospitals' quality improvement efforts. Among its
products and services, areas of expertise include JCAHO and CMS
performance measurement, clinical and operational benchmarking,
labor management programs, balanced scorecards, patient
satisfaction, evidence-based research, and patient safety. Premier
Healthcare Informatics is part of Premier Inc., a strategic health
care alliance that provides an array of performance solutions to
hospitals and other providers.
For more information about Premier
Healthcare Informatics, visit
www.premierinc.com/informatics or call (800) 805-4608.
[News release provided by Marty Ahrends,
executive director, Abraham Lincoln Healthcare Foundation]
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