TAMC earns high marks in safety, quality
PRESQUE ISLE — In new rankings released by both national and state non-profit organizations that track and gather data from both hospitals and patients, TAMC has earned high marks in safety and quality.
The county’s largest provider of health care services maintained its “A” grade in the fall 2013 update to the Hospital Safety Score, which rates how well hospitals protect patients from accidents, errors, injuries and infections. Only 32 percent of hospitals nationwide earn this score. TAMC also ranked sixth out of 40 hospitals statewide, in the Get Better Maine ranking released by the Maine Health Management Coalition Foundation.
The Hospital Safety Score is compiled under the guidance of the nation’s leading experts on patient safety and is administered by The Leapfrog Group, an independent industry watchdog. The first and only hospital safety rating to be analyzed in the peer-reviewed Journal of Patient Safety, the score is designed to give the public information they can use to protect themselves and their families.
The Get Better Maine hospital rankings are compiled and released by the Maine Health Management Coalition Foundation, a charitable organization whose mission it is to bring the people who get care, pay for care, and provide care together in order to measure and improve the quality of health care services in Maine. By publicly reporting quality information on Maine doctors and hospitals, the MHMC-F hopes to empower the public to make informed decisions about the care they receive.
“It is very gratifying to be awarded an ‘A’ safety score by the nationally-recognized Leapfrog Group and to earn such a high ranking in quality from the Maine Health Management Coalition. These honors represent the culmination of years of effort by our employees and medical staff to ensure we have the processes in place to do the right thing for our patients every time to keep them safe. Safety is deeply ingrained in our culture here at TAMC; we recognize the first step in improving the health of our patients is keeping them safe,” said Dr. Jay Reynolds, TAMC chief operating officer/chief medical officer. “I am proud and fortunate to be a resident of Maine. Eighty percent of hospitals in Maine have achieved an ‘A’ safety rating, the highest percentage in the country.”
Calculated under the guidance of Leapfrog’s Blue Ribbon Expert Panel, the Hospital Safety Score uses 28 measures of publicly available hospital safety data to produce a single A, B, C, D or F score representing a hospital’s overall capacity to keep patients safe from preventable harm. More than 2,500 general U.S. hospitals were assigned scores this fall.
“As patients begin to take a more active role in selecting where to receive health care, it has never been more important to focus on hospital safety and transparency. The ‘A’ hospitals, including TAMC, are helping us to raise the standards of health care nationwide,” said Leah Binder, president and CEO of Leapfrog. “We offer our congratulations and hope the hospital will continue to strive for an ever-increasing level of excellence in patient safety.”
Like Leapfrog, the Get Better Maine ratings are a compilation of data provided by hospitals to the federal government, as well as results of surveys patients complete, the Leapfrog results, and a number of other quality measurements. Additionally, because of the importance of protecting patients from serious medication errors, MHMC-F has developed its own medication safety survey and included the results to determine each Maine hospital’s ranking.
