Ridgeview Medical Center has been identified as one of the recipients of the HealthGrades 2009 Patient Safety Excellence Award™. The top five percent of all hospitals in the United States, 242 hospitals, were recognized with this award in a report recently issued by the leading independent health care ratings organization. Ridgeview is one of only 160 hospitals in the nation, and one of only nine hospitals in Minnesota, to receive the patient safety award two years in a row.
Robert Stevens, president and CEO of Ridgeview Medical Center, credits an organization-wide, unwavering commitment to the safest patient experience for achieving this national award twice. “I am very proud of Ridgeview’s employees and medical staff for their leadership in creating a safety-focused culture that has resulted in us getting this recognition again,” he said. “At a local level, Ridgeview continues to collaborate with Minnesota hospitals to tackle major safety initiatives designed to make health care safer for everyone in the state.”
According to HealthGrades, if all hospitals performed at the level of those receiving the Patient Safety Excellence Award,™ 211,697 negative patient safety events and 22,771 Medicare deaths could have been avoided while saving the United States approximately $2 billion between 2005 to 2007. During that time, 913,215 negative patient safety events were recorded among Medicare beneficiaries. This represents 2.3 percent of the nearly 38 million Medicare hospitalizations nationwide, and equates to one reported negative patient safety event every 1.7 minutes.
“I don’t know of any other industry where errors that cause harm are as accepted as they are in health care," said Rick May, MD, senior physician consultant at HealthGrades and coauthor of the study. "Every hospital across the country should continually strive for improvement until their rate of patient safety events is as close to zero as possible. We congratulate Ridgeview Medical Center because they continually demonstrate their extraordinary commitment to the reduction of patient safety events.”
HealthGrades developed this award to give patients more information about choosing a hospital. To view details of the study, the list of the HealthGrades 2009 Patient Safety Excellence Award™ recipients, ratings of all hospitals and nursing homes and information on physicians, please visit the HealthGrades Web site.