Mercy Health Partners Named One of the Nation's 100 Top Hospitals by Solucient

Muskegon, MI – March 13, 2006 – Mercy Health Partners was named one of the nation’s 100 Top Hospitals® by Solucient®, part of Thomson Healthcare, a leading provider of information and solutions to improve the cost and quality of healthcare. This is the first time Mercy has been recognized with this honor. In November, Mercy was a first time recipient of the Solucient Top 100 Cardiovascular Hospital award.

The 2006 Solucient 100 Top Hospitals: National Benchmarks for Success study appears in the March 12 edition of Modern Healthcare magazine. This new award recognizes hospitals that have achieved excellence in clinical outcomes, patient safety, financial performance, efficiency, and growth in patient volume.

“With this being the first year that Mercy Health Partners has been named a Solucient Top 100 Hospital, we are honored by this national recognition,” says Roger Spoelman, President and CEO of Mercy Health Partners. “This award was achieved based on the medical staff and associates who daily provide financial excellence and top quality healthcare to this community. This recognition reinforces the best healthcare is right here, along the lakeshore. On behalf of Mercy , I want to recognize the other lakeshore hospitals who received this distinction for the quality services that they provide.”

Mercy is the specialty referral hospital along the lakeshore. MHP’s services include heart and vascular, emergency services, cancer care, orthopedic and spine surgery, urology, bariatric services, a primary care network, nephrology, ENT, laboratory, palliative care and rehabilitation. MHP specializes in a variety of areas through specialized institutes and centers where physicians and staff work collaboratively to provide excellent care to patients. Some of these centers include the Heart and Vascular Institute, the Centers for Women’s Health, the Center for Weight Management, the Imaging Center of Excellence and a state of the art Emergency Center.

Research Highlights
More than half of the winning hospitals in the 2006 study are from the Midwest, and 30 of the 100 Top Hospitals facilities are in two states — Michigan and Ohio. When researchers evaluated hospital performance on a state-by-state basis, nine out of 12 Midwest states placed in the top two quintiles. The Midwest was also the top region in hospital performance in the 2004 edition of the 100 Top Hospitals national study.

At the other end of the spectrum, nearly two-thirds of states in the South (10 out of 17) ranked in the lowest two quintiles.

"The heavy concentration of high-performing hospitals in the Midwest represents the effectiveness and commitment of hospital leaders in the region,” says Jean Chenoweth, senior vice president, performance improvement and 100 Top Hospitals programs, Center for Healthcare Improvement, Thomson Healthcare. “When 75 percent of the states in a single region perform at such high levels, it reflects a single-minded focus on raising performance levels. The concentration of 30 percent of the 100 Top Hospitals in Michigan and Ohio is a tribute to the effort these hospitals’ boards, CEOs, and medical staff leaders have made to increase the value of services to their communities and patients.”

While the Midwest emerged as the clear overall leader in the 2006 study, 100 Top Hospitals winners in the West and South achieved the lowest expenses in the nation, and the West and Midwest set the benchmarks for profitability. 100 Top Hospitals national winners in the Northeast achieved the greatest growth in patient volume and the highest level of compliance with core measures — a set of widely accepted minimum standards of care for all patients.

Other key findings of the study include:

If all hospitals performed like the benchmark hospitals, more than 100,000 additional patients could survive each year, and an additional 114,000 could avoid complications.
With 25 percent higher admissions per bed, benchmark hospitals treated more patients than non-winning hospitals and also treated patients who were sicker and required more complex treatment.
The 100 Top Hospitals facilities spent an average of 12 percent less, per discharge, than peer hospitals.
Median total profit margin at 100 Top Hospitals winners was nearly three times the median of peer hospitals.
Salaries and benefits were $3,200 more a year per full-time staff member at benchmark hospitals.

The 14th edition of the Solucient 100 Top Hospitals: National Benchmarks for Success study uses a balanced scorecard approach and scores hospitals according to nine key organization-wide measures: risk-adjusted mortality, risk-adjusted complications, patient safety, core measures average, growth in patient volume, severity-adjusted average length of stay, expense per adjusted discharge, profit from operations, and cash to debt ratio.

More information on this study and other 100 Top Hospitals research is available at www.100tophospitals.com. Copies of the 100 Top Hospitals report can be purchased by calling Solucient at 800.568.3282 or logging on to www.100tophospitals.com.

Additional information can be found at www.MHP.com or at www.100TopHospitals.com under the "News/Press Room."