Of the 67 Top Urban Hospitals named in the U.S. this year, 17 are Kaiser Permanente medical centers in California.
Ten Kaiser Permanente Northern California hospitals have been named 2012 Leapfrog Top Hospitals, an honor that rewards medical centers for outstanding success in such areas as the use of electronic health records to reduce medication and other errors, performance on high-risk surgical procedures, low infection rates, and appropriate physician and nursing staffing.
Seven Kaiser Permanente hospitals in Southern California also received the honor. In all, 92 hospitals around the country were named Top Hospitals, out of more than 1,200 surveyed.
The 17 honored Kaiser Permanente hospitals in California comprise more than a quarter of the 67 top urban hospitals listed nationally.
“Leapfrog is the gold standard for hospital quality and this recognition reflects the exceptional performance of our hospitals, but that’s only part of the Kaiser Permanente story,” said Robert Pearl, MD, executive director and CEO of The Permanente Medical Group. “Our physicians, nurses and staff are able to provide continuous excellence from the outpatient to the inpatient setting and back through personalized, technologically advanced and closely coordinated care across all specialties. Having experts available from every specialty in the hospital and utilizing the most advanced electronic medical record allows physicians to provide their patients rapid, cutting-edge diagnosis and treatment. The result is lower mortality rates from heart attacks, strokes, cancer and sepsis than the rest of the country, and a dramatically reduced chance of our patients having to be re-hospitalized.”
Kaiser Permanente Northern California’s Top Hospitals in 2012 are:
- Antioch
- Richmond
- Roseville
- San Francisco
- Santa Clara
- South Sacramento
- South San Francisco
- Vacaville
- Vallejo
- Walnut Creek
The Kaiser Permanente hospitals honored in Southern California are: Fontana, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Diego, South Bay (formerly Harbor City), West Los Angeles and Woodland Hills.
“This is a transformative time for health care, and Kaiser Permanente is the model for the future,” said Gregory A. Adams, president of Kaiser Foundation Health Plan/Hospitals, Inc., in Northern California. “Our ultimate goal is to provide our patients with the right care in the right setting, and while the Leapfrog Group has recognized our hospitals as among the best in the nation, that setting is not always inside the hospital. We are improving the care we provide our patients and implementing evidence-based practices, which means they are recovering more quickly and going home sooner than they might have been able in the past – and in some cases, avoiding hospitalization all together.”
The Leapfrog Group is a coalition of public and private purchasers of employee health coverage founded a decade ago to work for improvements in health care safety, quality and affordability. It is an independent advocacy group working with a broad range of partners, including hospitals and insurers. The annual survey is the only voluntary effort of its kind.
The 2012 list of Top Hospitals includes university and other teaching hospitals, children’s hospitals and community hospitals in rural, suburban and urban settings. The selection is based on the results of the Leapfrog Group’s annual hospital survey, which measures hospitals’ performance on patient safety and quality, focusing on three critical areas of hospital care: how patients fare, resource use, and management structures in place to prevent errors. The results of the survey are posted on a website open to patients and families, the public, employers, and other purchasers of health care. The website is http://www.leapfroggroup.org/cp
Leapfrog also updated its hospital safety scores released earlier this year. In all, 17 of Kaiser Permanente’s 21 hospitals in Northern California received “A” grades, the highest possible. One received a “B” grade, and the remainder were not graded because they lacked sufficient volume in several measures used in the scoring.
