Each year, the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the federal agency that sets standards for healthcare quality and oversees major public health insurance programs, releases its national hospital ratings. This year’s May 13 announcement remarkably included three St. Elizabeth Healthcare hospitals — Dearborn, Edgewood and Ft. Thomas — rated as 5-star, the agency’s highest rating and one awarded to only 384 hospitals nationwide, or the top 12% nationally.
This year marks the third straight 5-star rating for St. Elizabeth Dearborn and the third in the past four years for St. Elizabeth Edgewood. This is the first 5-star rating for St. Elizabeth Ft. Thomas.
More impressively, St. Elizabeth is home to three of only four hospitals in Greater Cincinnati to receive the 5-star rating.
To celebrate this achievement, we spoke with Dr. James Horn, Executive Vice President and Chief Clinical Officer for St. Elizabeth Healthcare, to discuss its impact on the community.
What are the CMS ratings?
“The CMS hospital ratings are essentially the government providing a guide for Americans to make well-informed decisions about their healthcare and help determine which hospitals provide the highest level of care for patients. It considers five areas we as healthcare leaders focus on the most: mortality, safety of care, patient experience, timely and effective care, and readmissions. If CMS considers you a 5-star, it means you are strong across those areas and, in turn, doing a really good job all the way around as a hospital.
These measures are not arbitrary, rather they truly impact a patient’s care and lead to better health outcomes. That’s why we’ve made CMS’s standards a focus of our quality improvement efforts. Our teams constantly measure ourselves against the standards, looking to improve the care we provide.”
What does this designation mean?
“To those of us in healthcare, CMS 5-star is the highest goal we have. This is an honor to all of us at St. Elizabeth from our physicians to our patient-facing associates to all those behind-the-scenes. We see this as a team award. When you dedicate your career to healthcare, you do so because you feel a calling to help people and you want to be able to provide the best care to patients in their most vulnerable moments.
The ratings look at data points that reflect real-world patient care and outcomes concerns for families: whether their loved one has a lower risk of acquiring an infection while in the hospital, whether other patients at that hospital are satisfied and whether a patient presents to the hospital with an infection and is quickly treated to ensure they don’t progress to into severe sepsis or septic shock. These are the kinds of outcomes that CMS measures and that is what they are using to place St. Elizabeth among the best in the country.
When you consider that there are only four 5-star hospitals in Greater Cincinnati and 384 nationwide, and three are part of St. Elizabeth, that’s something that inspires a lot of pride.”
What does this mean for our community?
“First and foremost, it means the physicians and associates who work at St. Elizabeth — your family, friends and neighbors in this region — are skilled, talented and committed to take the best care of you. You do not need to travel for the highest level of care. It’s right here in Northern Kentucky and Southeastern Indiana. Our community can be proud of that.
Secondly, these ratings affirm the trust you can place in St. Elizabeth for care. Our community knows we are here for them and this federal agency measure backs that confidence.
Lastly, we want our patients to know that we aren’t satisfied. We are driven to sustain this high standard and continue to improve in every aspect of our services. Find more information about St. Elizabeth.
