University of Iowa Health Care leaders announced that University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics was named one of the nation's performance improvement leaders by Thomson Reuters.

UI Hospitals and Clinics and its senior management team were recognized for being one of 100 U.S. hospitals making the greatest progress in improving hospital-wide performance over five consecutive years.

The 2007 Thomson Reuters 100 Top Hospitals®: Performance Improvement Leaders have set national benchmarks for the rate and consistency of improvement in:

• clinical outcomes
• safety
• hospital efficiency
• financial stability

Iowa’s only comprehensive academic medical center and its medical staff have made major strides in increasing the quality and efficiency of services across the region.

“This award places our faculty and staff among the top five percent of hospitals in the nation in providing improved patient care that offers high quality and great value to our patients,” said Jean Robillard, MD, vice president for Medical Affairs, University of Iowa Health Care. “We cannot rest upon these laurels, however. This process is based upon continuous improvement, so we can take a moment to enjoy this recognition, but then we need to keep striving to raise the bar even higher.”

Findings from the fifth edition of the Thomson Reuters 100 Top Hospitals®: Performance Improvement Leaders study   appear in the August 11, 2008, issue of Modern Healthcare magazine.

“This study identifies superior leadership, based on the success of hospital executive teams’ long-term strategies for strengthening performance,” said Jean Chenoweth, senior vice president for performance improvement and 100 Top Hospitals programs at Thomson Reuters. “These are true ’Good to Great’ leadership teams that have focused on improving quality, efficiency, use of evidence-based medicine, and financial stability in order to better serve their patients and communities.”

The Thomson Reuters 100 Top Hospitals Performance Improvement Leaders study analyzed acute care hospitals nationwide using detailed empirical performance data, including publicly available Medicare MedPAR data, Medicare cost reports, and Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) outpatient data.

The study rated hospitals on eight factors:

• patient mortality
• medical complications
• patient safety
• length of stay
• expenses
• profitability
• cash-to-debt ratio
• use of evidence-based medicine

Researchers evaluated 2,867 short-term, acute care, non-federal hospitals grouped into five categories: major teaching hospitals, other teaching hospitals, large community hospitals, medium-sized community hospitals, and small community hospitals.

The Healthcare business of Thomson Reuters produces insights, information, benchmarks and analysis that enable organizations to manage costs, improve performance and enhance the quality of healthcare.

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Jean Robillard, MD

Thomson Reuters 100 Top Hospitals®