UW Hospital and Clinics wins quality award

University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics has been recognized by the Premier health care alliance as a winner of the Premier Award for Quality (AFQ). UW Hospital is one of 27 winners out of more than 3,800 eligible hospitals nationwide.

The AFQ recognizes leading health care organizations that efficiently provide outstanding patient care and consistently set the standard in clinical excellence nationwide. Distinguished by its consideration of performance-based criteria, including clinical quality outcomes, resource use and clinical process indicators, the AFQ measures top performers at the overall hospital level.

“Our physicians, nurses and other staff can be justly proud of this national honor,” says UW Hospital CEO Donna Katen-Bahensky. “I came to Wisconsin knowing of UW Hospital’s already robust national reputation for high-quality health care. This is a wonderful acknowledgement of hard work on the part of many people.”

All U.S. acute-care inpatient facilities that submitted data to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the CMS Hospital Compare project were considered for the AFQ. Using MedPar 2006 data, quality and efficiency indexes were calculated for 62 disease groups and at the overall hospital level. Quality was measured by the incidence of three adverse outcomes: mortality, morbidity and complications, which are combined into a single Quality Index using the preference weightings from the Corporate Hospital Rating Project (CHRP). The efficiency index was generated using length of stay to represent resource use.

Acute-care facilities attaining the top 1 percent designation are identified as having scores in the top two quintiles for process of care and in 10 out of 62 disease groups and at the overall hospital level for quality and efficiency. Additionally, hospitals had measures for quality and efficiency that were equal to or exceeded expected outcomes.