IBM Watson Health has announced its 2021 Fortune/IBM Watson Health 100 Top Hospitals® and 15 Top Health Systems award winners, naming the top-performing hospitals and health systems in the U.S.
This year’s ranking of top hospitals introduces a measure of hospitals’ contributions to community health with a focus on equity, along with measures of clinical outcomes, operational efficiency, patient experience, and financial health.
A team of experts at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity and the Bloomberg American Health Initiative at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, developed the measure of hospital contributions to community health with a focus on equity. For the ranking, hospitals were surveyed across three components: 1) assessing hospital contributions to community health as a provider of critical services for community health and preventive care; 2) identifying ways that hospitals contribute to community health as a community partner teaming up with local organizations to implement critical programs; and 3) focusing on ways that hospitals promote community health through their practices as anchor institutions supporting local economic and social progress. Hospitals received credit for meeting a certain number of best practice standards in each component as part of the survey scoring and the new measure led to a change in ranking for more than one-third of the 100 hospitals.
“Hospitals save lives both by caring for individuals who are sick and by working to keep their communities healthy,” said Joshua M. Sharfstein, MD, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement and Director of the Bloomberg American Health Initiative at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “By recognizing hospital excellence in community health with a focus on equity, IBM Watson Health is helping advance the broad and urgent mission of healthcare in the twenty-first century.”
“We are proud to bring forward this first assessment of hospital contributions to community health as a way to help hospitals identify and eliminate gaps in their programs, provide equitable quality care, and address health disparities,” said Irene Dankwa-Mullan, MD, MPH, Chief Health Equity Officer and Deputy Chief Health officer at IBM Watson Health. “We believe that including a community measure as part of the Fortune/IBM Watson Health 100 Top Hospitals ranking can help begin the process of change and improvement across the hospital community.”
The goal of the Fortune/IBM Watson Health 100 Top Hospitals and IBM Watson Health 15 Top Health Systems lists is to identify top performing hospitals and health systems and deliver insights that may help healthcare organizations focus their improvement initiatives on achieving consistent, balanced and sustainable high performance. The studies used to determine the lists are based on a balanced scorecard of publicly available clinical, operational, and patient satisfaction metrics and data.
Fortune/IBM Watson Health 100 Top Hospitals® List
Compared to similar hospitals, the hospitals included on the Fortune/IBM Watson Health 100 Top Hospitals list had better results on performance indicators intended to measure clinical outcomes, operational efficiency, patient experience and financial health. These include survival rates, patient complications, healthcare-associated infections, 30-day mortality and 30-day hospital-wide readmission rates, length of stay, throughput in emergency departments, inpatient expenses, profitability, and ratings from patients. Additionally, performance by these 100 hospitals, when extrapolated to all Medicare inpatients, could result in:
More than 79,000 additional lives saved in the hospital;More than 44,000 additional patients being complication-free;
More than $10.1 billion in inpatient costs saved; and
More than 34,000 fewer discharged patients readmitted within 30 days.
To determine the hospitals included on the Fortune/IBM Watson Health 100 Top Hospitals list, IBM Watson Health researchers evaluated 2,675 short-term, acute care, non-federal U.S. hospitals. All research was based on the following public data sets: Medicare cost reports, Medicare Provider Analysis and Review (MEDPAR) data, and data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Hospital Compare website. Hospitals do not apply for awards, and winners do not pay to market this honor.
In addition to the hospitals included on the Fortune/IBM Watson Health 100 Top Hospitals list, select hospitals were also recognized as Everest Award winners. These are hospitals that earned the Fortune/IBM Watson Health 100 Top Hospitals list designation and had the highest rates of improvement during a five-year period.
IBM Watson Health 15 Top Health Systems List
As compared to their peer health systems, the hospitals included on the IBM Watson Health 15 Top Health Systems list had better results on performance indicators intended to measure clinical outcomes, operational efficiency and patient experience. These include lower inpatient mortality rates and fewer patient complications, considering patient severity; care that resulted in fewer healthcare-associated infections; lower 30-day readmission rates; shorter lengths of stay; faster emergency care; higher scores on patient ratings of their overall hospital experience: and lower episode-of-care expenses for the in-hospital through aftercare process. Additionally, performance by these 15 health systems, when extrapolated to all Medicare inpatients, could result in:
Approximately 66,000 additional lives saved;
More than 22,000 additional patients being complication-free;
Healthcare-associated infections being reduced by 15 percent; and
Patients spending 31 fewer minutes in hospital emergency departments, per visit.
To determine the hospitals included on the IBM Watson Health 15 Top Health Systems list, IBM Watson Health researchers evaluated 324 health systems and 2,522 hospitals that are members of health systems. All research was based on the following public data sets: Medicare cost reports, Medicare Provider Analysis and Review (MEDPAR) data, and data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Hospital Compare website. Health systems do not apply for awards, and winners do not pay to market this honor.
