Hospital Earns Top Safety Ratings

Boulder Community Hospital ranks in the top 10% of hospitals nationwide for patient safety in Joint Replacement, Major Orthopedic Surgery, Neurological Care, Spinal Fusion and Spinal Surgery, according to the 2012 patient safety awards from CareChex, the medical quality rating service of the Delta Group — the nation's largest privately-held health care information service company.

BCH also ranks in the top 10% of hospitals in Colorado for patient safety in those five important clinical areas.

The hospital’s intensive and wide-ranging efforts to improve the quality and safety of patient care have been recognized with other CareChex awards.  BCH is ranked in the top 10% of hospitals in Colorado for patient safety in Interventional Coronary Care and Gall Bladder Removal.

BCH is among the top 10% of hospitals in the nation and our state for the medical excellence of our treatment of gastrointestinal hemorrhage.
 

Prestige of a CareChex Award
We believe CareChex provides the most statistically accurate ratings of hospital quality. Other rating services are one-dimensional, i.e. they analyze one factor in hospital care. This can lead to faulty conclusions about a hospital’s overall quality of care. For example, a hospital with strong ratings for its low mortality rates may have high complication rates.

CareChex, on the other hand, provides a comprehensive evaluation of the three major components of medical quality – the process of care, outcomes of care and patient satisfaction.

Processes of care are the actual procedures hospitals use to treat patients for specific medical problems. Evidence has proven that some processes are more effective than others. For example, CareChex looks at the percentage of heart attack patients who are given aspirin when they arrive at the hospital. Aspirin is an important initial treatment because it can help keep blood clots from forming and dissolve blood clots that can cause heart attacks.

CareChex also does a statistical analysis of the outcomes of a hospital’s care. Is the overall mortality rate what you would expect for the types of patients that hospital treats? Is the rate of medical complications average or lower than expected?

The final element of the CareChex evaluation is an analysis of patient satisfaction. Do patients feel the doctors and nurses communicate appropriately? Is the staff responsive to patient requests and needs?

The information for the CareChex analysis comes from publicly available data bases and includes virtually all general, acute-care, non-federal U.S. hospitals. The 2012 CareChex analysis consists of data from 2008-2010.

You can see the CareChex quality ratings at http://www.carechex.com/.


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