National study names 75 hospitals as 'best value'

A group of 75 hospitals have been named by research firm Data Advantage as offering the highest quality of care in the U.S.

These 75 facilities came out on the top of the firm's 2009-2010 Hospital Value Index, which crunches publicly-available data to examine hospital performance. The Index includes stats on hospital quality, affordability, efficiency and patient satisfaction.

To draw their conclusions, researchers looked at CMS and AHRQ data for more than 4,500 facilities, taking into account patient safety indicators, 30-day mortality scores and readmissions. It then chose 75 for its "Superior Quality Merit Award."

The company notes that hospitals it chose as best in value--the top 25 percent of those identified int he study--improved their quality scores by an average 8.14 percent since March 2009, while those in the remaining 75 percent saw their quality score drop by 1.1 percent during the same period.

To get more data from the study:
- read this Data Advantage press release
[1]- check out its Hospital Value Index site [2]

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