Tanner Medical Center/Carrollton and Tanner Medical Center/Villa Rica have been recognized among the top hospitals in the nation for patient experience by independent healthcare ratings firm Healthgrades.
This is the second consecutive year that the facilities have earned Healthgrades’ Outstanding Patient Experience Award, presented annually to the top 5 percent of hospitals with high patient satisfaction scores.
“How our patients are treated matters as much as the care we deliver,” said Loy Howard, president and CEO of Tanner Health System. “While a lot of our focus is placed on achieving superior clinical excellence, patient satisfaction also is a metric that we use to determine how well we’re doing in fulfilling the medical needs of the communities we serve. Every member of our team is dedicated to—and accountable for—delivering exceptional care and exceeding expectations.”
To be eligible for Healthgrades’ 2013 Outstanding Patient Experience Award, Tanner’s hospitals had to meet clinical quality thresholds and have data for a minimum number of surveys from the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems, or HCAHPS—the first national, standardized, publicly reported survey of patients' perspectives of hospital care, administered by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
Tanner Medical Center/Carrollton and Tanner Medical Center/Villa Rica each qualified in the top 80 percent of hospitals for clinical quality, and also had at least 100 completed HCAHPS surveys submitted by patients, enabling Healthgrades to reliably assess the hospitals’ performance.
“As hospitals continue to struggle with the delivery of high-quality, safe care in the face of mounting financial and regulatory pressures, the hospitals that have achieved Healthgrades 2013 Outstanding Patient Experience Award stand above the rest in terms of providing the most positive experience for patients during their hospital stay,” said Mark Evans, executive vice president for informatics and strategy for Healthgrades. “This exceptional performance reflects a commitment to superior quality of clinical care.”
Howard said Tanner’s focus on patient comfort is part of the health system’s culture.
“We’ve always been a local hospital system caring for neighbors,” said Howard. “The patients we serve are also our kids’ baseball coaches, the people who go to church with our parents, the people who live down the road from us. We are all part of the community. That’s why we go above and beyond, ensuring that the people who rely on us receive the best possible care.”
Another Tanner hospital, Higgins General Hospital in Bremen, also has recently received national recognition from rural healthcare ratings firm iVantage, which named the hospital as the only one in Georgia to make its list of the nation’s Top 100 Critical Access Hospitals.
For more information on Healthgrades or for more information about hospital and physician quality, visit www.healthgrades.com.