Mercy Again Recognized as Top 100 Value Hospital

SPRINGFIELD — For the third consecutive year, Mercy Medical Center has gained recognition as a Top 100 Community Value hospital by Cleverley + Associates of Columbus, Ohio, a leading health care financial-consulting firm specializing in operational benchmarking and performance-enhancement strategies. Mercy’s designation is noted in the independent organization’s recent publication, State of the Hospital Industry — 2012 Edition.

Mercy Medical Center is again honored to receive both the Community Value 100 and Community Value Five Star Awards. These awards provide independent validation and additional confirmation that Mercy is one of the nation’s highest-scoring facilities in measures of the delivery of high-quality care at a reasonable cost, said Daniel Moen, president and CEO of the Sisters of Providence Health System. As a consistent provider of high-quality care, he said, Mercy demonstrates that such care is ultimately less expensive because it results in better patient outcomes and fewer hospital readmissions. And these factors are increasingly important as consumers and employers seek out the best value for their health care dollars.

Written by Dr. William Cleverley, a noted expert in health care finance, State of the Hospital Industry reports selected measures of hospital financial performance and discusses the critical factors that lie behind them. The publication focuses on the U.S. acute-care hospital industry over a three-year period (2008-10).

For the ninth year, State of the Hospital Industry reports an exclusive measure developed by Cleverley + Associates: the Community Value Index (CVI). The CVI is a proprietary index created to offer a measure of the value that a hospital provides to its community. The book outlines the data used to calculate the CVI as well as provides a list of the Top 100 and all Five-Star (top-quintile) hospitals.

The topic of hospital value is increasingly being discussed, and issues of pricing and community benefit have been well-publicized, but little has been offered to measure the broad scope of value, Cleverley noted. In response, the Community Value Index was created to provide an assessment of a hospital’s performance in four areas: financial strength and reinvestment, cost of care, pricing, and quality. Fundamentally, the CVI suggests that a hospital provides value to the community when it is financially viable, is appropriately reinvesting back into the facility, maintains a low-cost structure, has reasonable charges, and provides high-quality care to patients.