Sarasota Memorial among top 5% for patient safety

Sarasota Memorial Hospital’s Health Care System received HealthGrades’ “2012 Patient Safety Excellence Award” this morning – a designation given to the nation’s top 5% hospitals for patient safety. It is the ninth consecutive year that Sarasota Memorial has received the independent healthcare rating organization’s safety award.

To evaluate patient safety, HealthGrades analyzed millions of hospitalization records from the Medicare Provider Analysis and Review (MedPAR) database and used Patient Safety Indicator software from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to calculate event rates for 13 indicators of patient safety for the nation’s hospitals.

“Delivering safe patient care is not a process, procedure or safety list that you check off at the end of each day – it is a mindset and way of caring for patients every minute of every day that works only with the care and commitment of a competent, cohesive team,” said Sarasota Memorial CEO Gwen MacKenzie, in a news release.

HealthGrades’ analysis encompassed approximately 40 million hospitalization records (2008-2010) from 5,000 hospitals nationwide that participate in the Medicare program. This year’s study found that Medicare patients at Patient Safety Excellence Award hospitals were almost 48% less likely to experience one of 13 preventable safety events compared to hospitals in the bottom 5% in the nation. If all hospitals performed at Sarasota Memorial’s level of distinction, approximately 254,000 patient safety events and 56,367 deaths among Medicare patients could have been avoided, according to the study.

Contact Kurt Schultheis at [email protected].