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BWH this week received a HealthGrades’ 2008 Distinguished Hospital Award for Patient Safety as one of the top 249 hospitals in the country.
That puts BWH in the top 5 percent of about 5,000 hospitals analyzed by HealthGrades Inc., an independent health care rating company based in Golden, Colo. This year marks the third year BWH has made HealthGrades’ “List of Best-Performing Hospitals,” making BWH the only Massachusetts hospital to make the list three years straight.
“This honor is testament to the skill and dedication of all our care teams,” said BWH President Gary Gottlieb.
HealthGrades analyzed more than 40.6 million Medicare inpatient records, which included 1.1 million patient safety incidents, between 2004 and 2006. Patients treated at top-performing hospitals like BWH had, on average, a 43 percent lower chance of experiencing one or more errors when compared with the poorest performing hospitals.
If all U.S. hospitals had performed at the level of the 2008 patient-safety awardees from 2004 through 2006, the years examined in the new patient-safety study, an estimated 220,106 patient-safety incidents, 37,214 Medicare deaths and $2 billion in spending could have been avoided, according to HealthGrades.