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Awards and Accreditations

BMC is Top Performer in CMS/Premier Program
September 9, 2009 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Berkshire Medical Center earns Top Performer status in National Medicare/Premier Healthcare Alliance Project PITTSFIELD, MA – Adding to its national recognition for quality care from organizations like HealthGrades® and the American Heart Association, Berkshire Medical Center has been named a top performer in a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)/Premier healthcare alliance project that rewards hospitals for delivering high quality care. BMC is one of about 250 hospitals in the US to participate in a pilot program with CMS and Premier, known as the Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration (HQID) project. In the fourth year of the six year project, BMC recently received awards for Top Performance and Attainment in the clinical areas of Hip and Knee Replacement and Acute Myocardial Infarction (AMI) and Attainment in the treatment of Heart Failure and Pneumonia. BMC consistently participates in national quality measurement programs such as HQID, which is a voluntary program for US hospitals. BMC was the only participating hospital in Massachusetts to achieve two or more top performance awards and one of only 53 participating hospitals nationwide to achieve that distinction in the fourth year of the project. Overall, 206 awards were given to these top-performing hospitals. Over the course of the first four years of the project, BMC has received 12 overall awards, including five for AMI, three for Pneumonia, two for Heart Failure and this year’s two new honors for Hip and Knee Replacement. “Providing outstanding service to our community continues to be our primary mission,” said Diane Kelly, RN, Chief Operating Officer of BMC. “Our successes in this project are a testament to our ongoing efforts to improve the quality of care we offer our patients.” “This high level of quality care was achieved through the dedication of our entire staff,” said David Phelps, President and CEO of Berkshire Health Systems. “Berkshire Medical Center participates in programs like the HQID so that our community can be confident, through objective review, that we provide exceptional care.” “The successes of the hospitals – small and large, urban and rural, teaching and non-teaching – in the HQID project have led to its consideration as the basis for key national health reforms,” said Susan DeVore, Premier president and CEO. “As the proposal of a national value-base purchasing program becomes a reality, hospitals participating in HQID will have six years experience with such a model.” BMC is ranked among the top 5% of hospitals in the nation for overall clinical excellence by HealthGrades and is a recipient of the 2009 Distinguished Hospital Award for Clinical Excellence. In addition, BMC is one of only 13 hospitals in the US to achieve Triple Gold recognition in the American Heart Association’s Get with the GuidelinesSM program for the care of patients with coronary artery disease, stroke and heart failure. BMC has been recognized with eight consecutive Performance Achievement awards for outstanding performance in the care of patients with coronary artery disease, and is the only hospital in the nation so honored eight years running. BMC was also the first hospital in the United States to be honored with awards for stroke and heart failure, holding five consecutive yearly Performance Achievement awards for outstanding care of stroke patients and four consecutive yearly Performance Achievement awards for care of patients with heart failure. Nationally, for those hospitals participating in the HQID project, the average composite quality scores, an aggregate of all quality measures within each clinical area, improved significantly between the inception of the program and the end of year four in all five clinical focus areas. Additional research by Premier using the Hospital Compare dataset also showed that, by March of 2008, HQID participants scored an average 6.9 percentage points higher than non-participants when evaluating 19 common Hospital Compare measures.