Two Memorial Health System hospitals – Abraham Lincoln Memorial Hospital of Lincoln and Taylorville Memorial Hospital – have been recognized by iVantage Health Analytics as two of the nation’s top 100 best-performing critical access hospitals.

The recognition is based on iVantage’s Hospital Strength Index and its measures of market conditions, clinical and operational performance and financial and qualitative outcomes. 

“We are excited and proud to have earned this national recognition based on our performance,” said Dolan Dalpoas, Abraham Lincoln Memorial Hospital’s president and chief executive officer. “Our employees, physicians and volunteers work together to serve the needs of our patients, and have earned this honor through their commitment to improve the health of the people and communities we serve.”

“Measuring the effectiveness of our care delivery processes and patient outcomes is vital to improving the quality of care we provide to every patient, every day,” said Dan Raab, Taylorville Memorial Hospital’s president and chief executive officer. “To be honored as one of only five top 100 HealthStrong hospitals in Illinois provides our patients and the communities we serve with another important assurance of the high-quality healthcare services that are available to them at our hospitals.”

Findings of the iVantage Health Analytics’ study on the nation’s critical access hospitals (CAH) shed new, multi-dimensional light on the characteristics of the top 100 performing CAHs. The 2013 “Benchmark Performance for Critical Access Hospitals” study is a trending study of the rural hospital industry. Key findings from the study include:

·  Top 100 CAHs perform as well or better at the median overall than the full census of all U.S. general acute care hospitals;
·  Top 100 CAHs face the least population-based demand for future healthcare services, while their quality is near the top quartile when compared to all U.S. general acute care hospitals; and,
·  Top 100 CAH performance is in the top quartile of all U.S. general acute care hospitals in the financial and cost and charge categories of the study.

“Small and rural hospitals play a critical role in providing efficient and effective healthcare that is on par with other larger suburban and urban counterparts,” said John Morrow, executive vice president of iVantage Health Analytics Inc. “Rural hospitals have new and difficult demands that are best managed with actionable information.

“The Hospital Strength Index reflects the multiple challenges of running a hospital by incorporating the measures on which the industry has worked to gain consensus and standardization.”

The Hospital Strength Index ranks all of the nation’s more than 4,400 general acute care hospitals, including more than 1,300 critical access hospitals. The Index is based on eight performance categories measuring 56 different performance metrics. The Index offers hospital executives, trustees and boards of directors an objective way to measure their relative performance internally and among their peers.