Sarah Bush Lincoln received a four of five-star rating on the Hospital Compare website from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
CMS created the five-star quality rating system to help consumers, their families, and caregivers compare hospitals more easily and to help identify areas about which you may want to ask questions. The overall rating ranges from one to five stars. The more stars, the better a hospital performed on the available quality measures. The most common overall rating is 3 stars.
Medicare ranks more than 4,000 hospitals nationally on its Hospital Compare website. The overall rating summarizes up to 57 quality measures reflecting common conditions that hospitals treat.
Hospitals may perform more complex services or procedures not reflected in the measures on Hospital Compare. The overall rating shows how well each hospital performed, on average, compared to other hospitals in the U.S. in seven areas: mortality, safety of care, readmission, patient experience, effectiveness of care, timeliness of care and efficient use of medical imaging.
SBL Quality Manager Brenda Miller, RN, said, “We are always striving for excellence and we are pleased with the four-star rating.” She noted that Sarah Bush Lincoln has implemented numerous measures in the last few years to enhance the overall quality of care. Those measures include telemedicine in the Critical Care Unit and teleneurology services in the Emergency Department and on the patient floors to assist when someone presents with a stroke or other neurology disorder.
The largest change was the implementation of a new electronic medical record when Sarah Bush Lincoln implemented Cerner, a new system to help streamline processes and spot discrepancies. Miller added that a clinical team has been working diligently for a couple a years to eliminate catheter-associated infections and prevent readmissions for the same illness.
For more information, contact Miller at 217 258-2546.