Mercy Medical Center Recognized in National Report
SPRINGFIELD — Mercy Medical Center was recently recognized as a top-ranked Community Value Provider by Cleverley + Associates of Columbus, Ohio, a leading health care financial consulting firm specializing in operational benchmarking and performance enhancement strategies. The organization released the findings as part of its new publication, State of the Hospital Industry, 2010 Edition.
“Mercy Medical Center is honored to receive both the Community Value 100 and Community Value Five Star Awards. We are particularly proud to be identified as one of the highest-scoring facilities in the country in measures of quality of care and costs,” said Dr. William Bithoney, interim president and CEO of the Sisters of Providence Health System and chief operating officer of Mercy Medical Center.
“These awards serve as independent validation that Mercy’s quality scores exceed those of its peer hospitals while charges and costs are significantly lower than peer hospitals,” he added. “Health care value and value-based purchasing of health care services are increasingly important concepts driving health care reform, and Mercy continues to prove that high-quality hospital care can cost less.”
Written by Dr. William Cleverley, a noted expert in health care finance, the 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 time period (2006-08).
For the seventh year, the 2010 State of the Hospital Industry reports an exclusive measure developed by Cleverley + Associates: the Community Value Index (CVI). This 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 and also provides a list of the Top 100 and all Five Star (top quintile) hospitals.
“The topic of hospital value is increasingly being discussed. Issues of pricing and community benefit have been well-publicized but little has been offered to measure the broad scope of value,” added James Cleverley, co-author. “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.”