Fourteen New York hospitals have earned recognition for excellence in patient experience and safety, according to Healthgrades’ latest report released this morning.
Just two facilities, the Hospital for Special Surgery and White Plains Hospital, received top honors in both metrics, the data shows. HSS repeated its designation from last year and just 79 hospitals across the country received dual recognition, according to Healthgrades.
Dr. Brad Bowman, Healthgrades’ chief medical officer, emphasized that achieving dual recognition is challenging because hospitals must excel at two “diametrically opposed” things. While patient safety depends on following procedure, building a positive experience relies on fulfilling patients’ needs and fostering communication between staff and their charges.
“A wonderful patient experience is a whole different skill set,” he said. “Other than Hospital for Special Surgery and [White Plains], it’s a completely different recipient list because it’s a completely different set of management skills.”
Nine institutions ranked high for patient safety alone, including five Northwell Health sites: Huntington Hospital, Lenox Hill Hospital, Long Island Jewish Medical Center, North Shore University Hospital and Plainview Hospital. The remaining facilities that performed well are Mount Sinai Morningside, New York-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital, New York City Health + Hospitals/Queens and St. Anthony Community Hospital in Warwick. Mather Hospital, Adirondack Medical Center-Saranac Lake and St. Francis Hospital & Heart Center performed well in patient experience.
H+H/Queens, Huntington, North Shore University Hospital, Lenox Hill, Mather, Brooklyn Methodist, St. Francis and St. Anthony and Saranac Lake all repeated their honors from 2023. White Plains received an award for patient experience last year as well.
Healthgrades recognized 444 hospitals for their safety efforts and 388 for patient experience after evaluating more than 4,500 institutions. To choose safety honors recipients, the organization analyzed 13 indicators from Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services data, including serious complications such as falls, collapsed lungs due to chest procedures, bed sores and catheter-related bloodstream infections. Patient experience scores focused on doctor and nurse communications.
Five more New York hospitals ranked for either safety or experience in 2024 than last year. This is a feat given national trends which show patient safety indicators declining at many facilities across the country as hospitals continue to grapple with staffing challenges, Bowman said.
“The lower-performing hospitals have performed much worse over the past four years and pretty much continue to perform worse, so much so that they’ve dragged the overall average for the group down,” he said.
Bowman added that it has also become more difficult to earn top Healthgrades honors because the organization has returned to the more stringent analysis it used before the Covid-19 pandemic.
In light of this, he noted White Plains Hospital’s dual designation as a particular achievement given that Montefiore Health System, the group White Plains is part of, often treats very medically complex and seriously ill patients.
Bowman emphasized that there is very little statistical difference between any of the top-ranked hospitals because facilities must be exceptional to earn any designation. He called New York a center of high-quality health care and noted that Long Island Jewish Medical Center, Mount Sinai Morningside and White Plains have all made large improvements in patient safety.
“New York City hospitals are very competitive,” he said. “There’s so many different hospitals you could go to, I think that’s required them to also deliver a great patient experience.”
Healthgrades is headquartered in Denver and first released patient safety excellence awards in 2003.
Jacqueline Neber , 2024-03-12 09:33:04
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