Newswise — UC San Diego Health System was this week named one of the nation’s 100 Top Hospitals® by Truven Health AnalyticsTM. This is the third time UC San Diego Health System has been recognized for this prestigious honor.

The Truven Health 100 Top Hospitals study identifies hospitals and leadership teams that provide the highest level of value to their communities based on a national balanced scorecard. The scorecard measures overall organizational performance across 11 key analytic measures including patient care, operational efficiency and financial stability.

“It is an incredible honor for UC San Diego to be named a top performing health system in the country,” said Paul Viviano, CEO, UC San Diego Health System. “This national recognition is the result of the extraordinary devotion of our staff and faculty to achieve excellence for our patients through improved safety, shorter hospitals stays, increased satisfaction, lower costs, and demonstrably superior clinical outcomes.”

UC San Diego Health System is listed as a top hospital among 3,000 U.S. hospitals and is recognized among the nation’s most prominent teaching institutions, including Duke University Hospital, Emory University Hospital and Stanford Hospital.

To conduct the 100 Top Hospitals study, Truven Health researchers evaluated close to 3,000 short-term, acute-care, nonfederal hospitals. Risk-adjusted methodologies were used to analyze public information — Medicare cost reports, Medicare Provider Analysis and Review (MEDPAR) data, and core measures and patient satisfaction data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Hospital Compare reports. Hospitals do not apply, and winners do not pay to market this honor.

“This year’s 100 Top Hospitals represent the highest national standards in hospital care and management today. They set the benchmarks for peers around the country to follow — consistently delivering outstanding quality of care, satisfaction and community value at a reasonable cost,” said Jean Chenoweth, senior vice president for performance improvement and the 100 Top Hospitals program at Truven Health Analytics. “The majority of the 2015 award winners have produced year-to-year performance improvement, as well. This speaks to the consistent focus on excellence by the entire organization and the men and women who serve patients.”

The study shows that if all hospitals in the U.S. performed at the level of this year's winners:

  • 126,471 additional lives could be saved
  • 108,926 additional patients could be complication-free
  • $1.8 billion in inpatient costs could be saved
  • The average patient stay would decrease by half a day
  • Episode-of-illness expense would be 2 percent lower than the peer average

UC San Diego Health System has been continuously recognized for excellence in patient care. In December 2014, UC San Diego Health System was awarded the 2014 Leapfrog Top Hospital distinction for safety and quality, an elite distinction given to less than seven percent of all eligible hospitals, and also twice received A Hospital Safety grades by the Leapfrog Group in 2014. The A grades for UC San Diego Health System are based on the ability to prevent errors, injuries and infections. The scores place UC San Diego Health System among the safest hospitals in the United States.

UC San Diego Health System is also a recipient of Healthgrades’ “Distinguished Hospital Award for Clinical Excellence.” Top performing hospitals were selected based on clinical excellence across a broad spectrum of care in specialty areas such as cardiac and neuro surgery and gastrointestinal, pulmonary and critical care.

In 2016, UC San Diego Health System will open Jacobs Medical Center, the largest hospital project in southern California. The 10-story, 509,500-square-foot expansion of UC San Diego Health System’s La Jolla campus will focus on three specialty services, including comprehensive cancer care, advanced surgery and full spectrum women and infants care. When completed, this new facility will help UC San Diego Health System meet the needs of its local, national and global communities, offering leading-edge treatments, world-class physicians and quality patient care.

The winning Truven hospitals were announced in the March 2, 2015 edition of Modern Healthcare magazine. More information on this study and other 100 Top Hospitals research is available at 100tophospitals.com