HUMC ranks in 5 Specialties in US News Media Groups
By Mel Fabrikant Saturday, August 16, 2008, 02:02 PM EDT
HUMC
Authoritative and influential, the 2008 America’s Best Hospitals guide ranks 170 medical centers nationwide in 16 specialties--with full data available online for another 1,500 that are unranked. In addition, the Honor Roll singles out the “best of the best.”
The 16 ranked specialties are cancer; gastroenterology; ear, nose, and throat; endocrinology; geriatric care; gynecology; heart and heart surgery; kidney disease; neurology and neurosurgery; ophthalmology; orthopedics; psychiatry; rehabilitation; respiratory disorders; rheumatology; and urology.
“The America’s Best Hospitals rankings provide readers with trusted material during some of life’s most concerning times – hospitalization,” said Brian Kelly, editor of U.S. News & World Report. “Our rankings highlight the internal culture of excellence embraced by caregivers in the great hospitals throughout the U.S.”
“Talent and money alone don’t put hospitals in the rankings,” agreed Best Hospitals editor Avery Comarow. “The truly best hospitals are never satisfied,” he said. “Of course they have high medical standards. But the emphasis is not only on doing well, but always doing better--squeezing another few percentage points out of the infection rate, improving the quality of life of elderly patients besides helping more of them survive.”
“Providing a high quality, clinically outstanding patient experience continues to be our number one, non-negotiable goal,” said John P. Ferguson, president and chief executive officer of Hackensack University Medical Center. “Our healthcare team continues to focus on quality improvement initiatives in order for our patients to receive the best care.”
Methodology
The rankings in 12 of the 16 specialties weigh three elements equally: reputation, death rate, and a set of care-related factors such as nursing and patient services. In these 12 specialties, hospitals have to pass through several gates to be ranked and considered a Best Hospital:
1. The first gate determines whether a hospital is eligible to be ranked at all by requiring that any of three conditions be met--to be a teaching hospital, to be affiliated with a teaching hospital, or to have at least six important medical technologies from a defined list of 13.
2. The second gate determines whether a hospital is eligible to be ranked in a particular specialty. To be eligible, the hospital had to either have at least a specified volume in certain procedures and conditions over three years, or had to have been nominated in our yearly specialist survey.
3. The third gate is whether a hospital does well enough to be ranked, based on its reputation, death rate, and factors like nurse staffing and technology.
In the four other specialties--ophthalmology, psychiatry, rehabilitation, and rheumatology -- ranking is based solely on reputation, derived from the three most recent physician surveys.
Hackensack University Medical Center is a 775-bed teaching and research hospital and provides the largest number of admissions in New Jersey. For two years in a row, HealthGrades® named HUMC one of America’s 50 Best Hospitals. This designation recognizes hospitals that have demonstrated superior clinical quality over a seven-year time period, based upon an analysis of more than 75 million Medicare patient records from 1999-2005. These hospitals have achieved better survival rates and lower complication rates across dozens of medical procedures and diagnoses, from cardiac care to orthopedic surgery, consistently ranking among the top five percent in the nation for overall clinical outcomes. HUMC is the only healthcare facility in New Jersey, New York, and New England to be named one of America’s 50 Best Hospitals in 2007 and 2008. Only one percent of the nation’s hospitals can make this claim.
To learn more about Hackensack University Medical Center, please visit www.humc.com.
PHOTO CAPTION:
Hackensack University Medical Center has been ranked in five specialties including geriatric care, gynecology, heart and heart surgery, neurology and neurosurgery, and orthopedics in U.S. News and World Report 2008 publication of America’s Best Hospitals. Celebrating their outstanding achievements are, from left, Peter Praeger, M.D., acting co-chief, cardiac and thoracic surgery; R. Knight Steel, M.D., division director, Geriatric Medicine; Louis Evan Teichholz, M.D., director of cardiac services and division director, cardiology; Dev Raj Gupta, M.D., division director, Neurology; Arnold Byer, M.D., vice chairman, Department of Surgery; Michael Kelly, M.D., chairman, Orthopaedic Surgery; Arno Fried, M.D., chairman, Neurosurgery; Manuel Alvarez, M.D., chairman, Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology; Julius Gardin, M.D., chairman, Department of Internal Medicine; and Eric Somberg, M.D., acting co-chief, cardiac and thoracic surgery.
