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BLUEFIELD, W.V. (April 7, 2009) – Bluefield Regional Medical Center has been identified as one of the recipients of the 2009 HealthGrades Patient Safety Excellence Award™. The top five percent of all hospitals in the U.S. were recognized with this award in a report issued today by the leading independent healthcare ratings organization. Bluefield Regional Medical Center is the only non-teaching hospital in West Virginia to be recognized for patient safety excellence on a national basis by HealthGrades in 2009. If all hospitals performed at the level of Patient Safety Excellence Award™ recipients, approximately 211,697 patient safety events and 22,771 Medicare deaths could have been avoided while saving the U.S. approximately $2.0 billion from 2005 through 2007. During the course of the HealthGrades study, eight patient safety indicators showed improvement, while seven worsened, across all hospitals nationwide. The overall incidence rate remained virtually unchanged compared to last year’s study. Between 2005 and 2007, 913,215 total patient safety events were recorded among Medicare beneficiaries, which represents 2.3 percent of the nearly 38 million Medicare hospitalizations. This equates to one reported patient safety event every 1.7 minutes. “We congratulate Bluefield Regional Medical Center because they continually demonstrate their extraordinary commitment to the reduction of patient safety events,” said Rick May, MD, senior physician consultant at HealthGrades and co-author of the study. “I don’t know of any other industry where errors that cause harm are as accepted as they are in healthcare. Every hospital across the country should continually strive for improvement until their rate of patient safety events is as close to zero as possible,” Dr. May added. The sixth annual HealthGrades Patient Safety in American Hospitals Study applies methodology developed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to identify the incident rates of 15 patient safety indicators among Medicare patients at virtually all of the nation's nearly 5,000 nonfederal hospitals. Additionally, HealthGrades applied its methodology using 12 patient safety indicators to identify the best-performing hospitals, or Patient Safety Excellence Award™ Hospitals, which represent the top five percent of all U.S. hospitals. HealthGrades developed this award to give patients more information about choosing a hospital. HealthGrades’ individual hospital ratings can be viewed for free at HealthGrades.com. The following are the patient safety indicators studied:  Complications of anesthesiaDeath in low mortality Diagnostic Related Groupings (DRGs)Decubitus ulcer (bed sores)Death among surgical inpatients with serious treatable complicationsIatrogenic pneumothoraxSelected infections due to medical carePost-operative hip fracturePost-operative hemorrhage or hematomaPost-operative physiologic and metabolic derangementsPost-operative respiratory failurePost-operative pulmonary embolism or deep vein thrombosisPost-operative sepsisPost-operative abdominal wound dehiscenceAccidental puncture or lacerationTransfusion reaction |
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