L-R: Wes Champion, Senior Vice President, Premier Performance Partners, Susan DeVore, President and CEO, Premier, Inc., Kate Lim, Director of Quality for RTH, and Michael J. Alkire, Chief Operating Officer, Premier, Inc.
For the third year in a row, Riverside Tappahannock Hospital (RTH) is among the best in the nation at providing safe, reliable and efficient care, according to Premier, America's largest healthcare performance improvement alliance.
RTH is the only hospital in Virginia and one of only 20 hospitals in the country to receive a Citation of Merit for achieving top performance in five of the seven areas measured in Premier's QUEST collaborative including cost and efficiency, inpatient and outpatient evidence-based care, mortality, safety, patient experience and appropriate hospital use.
Specifically, RTH is being recognized for:
- Obtaining a mortality rate at least 15% less than expected
- Reducing the average cost of care to at least less than $6,870 per discharge
- Reliably delivering inpatient and outpatient evidence-based care measures in the areas of heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia and surgical care at least 96% of the time;
- Reducing preventable harm events
This recognition also marks the ninth major quality award that RTH has received in the past two years.
"Quality and patient safety are always our number one priority. We continually evaluate our processes to make sure patient safety and quality are the best they can be. Receiving the QUEST Award is an acknowledgment that we are doing the right things as we continue our processes of improving patient outcomes," said Kate Lim, Director of Quality for RTH.
QUEST is a performance improvement collaborative of approximately 365 hospitals working to make healthcare safer, more efficient and consistently effective. All QUEST hospitals participating in QUEST from January 2014-October 2014 were eligible for the QUEST Award.
"QUEST hospitals are driving outstanding patient care and setting high standards in clinical excellence nationwide," said Susan DeVore, Premier president and CEO. "QUEST hospitals work to outperform in healthcare together, which is exactly what Riverside Tappahannock Hospital is doing. Premier congratulates them for the fantastic achievements they've made."
The nation's leading hospitals created QUEST to set standards that ensure the delivery of high-value healthcare. Since 2008, QUEST hospitals saved approximately 160,000 lives and $13.2 billion. They've also prevented approximately 55,800 readmissions since 2011 and approximately 21,700 instances of harm, such as hospital-acquired infections, since 2010. In addition, recently published peer-reviewed research suggests that QUEST participants outperform national mortality comparisons by at least 10 percent.