ANAHEIM, CA – The Premier healthcare alliance has singled out 23 hospitals as the top in the country for their commitment to high-quality patient care and operational efficiency. Several of the criteria Premier used to gauge performance were achieved with the help of information technology.

Premier, a purchasing alliance, is composed of more than 2,100 U.S. hospitals and more than 58,999 other healthcare sites whose goal is to improve care, while cutting costs. It chose the top hospitals for safety from more than 3,796 eligible hospitals nationwide.

“The Award for Quality honors the efforts of our nation’s leading hospitals to provide superior quality and operational efficiency,” said Susan DeVore, Premier incoming president and CEO. “We’re thrilled to celebrate the efforts of these facilities as they improve the health of the communities they serve.”

Premier considered all acute care inpatient facilities in the United States that submitted data to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the CMS Hospital Compare project.

“Consistency is the true hallmark of success when it comes to quality benchmarks in healthcare,” Marian Block, MD, vice president and chief quality officer at Western Pennsylvania Hospital in Pittsburgh, one of the hospitals recognized by Premier.

Quality was measured by the incidence of three adverse outcomes: mortality, morbidity and complications, which are combined into a single quality index using the preference weightings from the Corporate Hospital Rating Project. The efficiency index was generated using length of stay to proxy for resource utilization.

2009 Award for Quality winners are:

• SSM DePaul Health Center – Bridgeton, Mo.
• St. Elizabeth Health Center – Youngstown, Ohio
• Hoag Memorial Hospital – Newport Beach, Calif.
• Memorial Regional Hospital – Hollywood, Fla.
• Winchester Hospital – Winchester, Mass.
• Hackensack University Medical Center – Hackensack, N.J.
• Good Samaritan Hospital – Cincinnati
• Saint Vincent Health Center – Erie, Pa.
• Albert Einstein Medical Center – Philadelphia
• Allegiance Health – Jackson, Mich.
• Mercy General Hospital – Sacramento, Calif.
• Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center – Boston
• Sound Shore Medical Center of Westchester – New Rochelle, N.Y.
• Joint Township District Memorial Hospital – Saint Marys, Ohio
• St. Vincent Charity Hospital – Cleveland
• Lakewood Hospital – Lakewood, Ohio
• The Western Pennsylvania Hospital – Pittsburgh
• Memorial Hospital – Colorado Springs, Colo.
• Penrose/St. Francis Healthcare – Colorado Springs, Colo.
• Rush University Medical Center – Chicago
• Paoli Memorial Hospital – Paoli, Pa.
• Medical University of South Carolina – Charleston, S.C.