| BMC Achieves Top Performer Status in National Quality Project |
| December 2, 2010 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 the Hospital Value Index™, HealthGrades®, the American Heart Association and other national organizations, 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 225 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 fifth year of the six year project, BMC recently received awards for Top Performer and Attainment in Acute Myocardial Infarction (AMI), Pneumonia and the Surgical Care Improvement Project and Attainment in the treatment of Heart Failure. BMC consistently participates in national quality measurement programs such as HQID, which is a voluntary program for US hospitals. Over the course of the first five years of the project, BMC has received 19 overall awards, including seven for AMI, five for Pneumonia, two for the Surgical Care Improvement Project, three for Heart Failure and two 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.” “HQID was created to test the impact of economic incentives on quality,” said Susan DeVore, president and CEO of Premier, a healthcare quality and cost improvement alliance of more than 2,400 U.S. hospitals and 70,000-plus other healthcare sites. “As CMS prepares to implement value-based purchasing for all hospitals as required by the Affordable Care Act, HQID participants will have six years of experience with such a model.” For hospitals participating in the HQID project, the average Composite Quality Score (CQS), an aggregate of all process and outcomes measures within each clinical area, improved by 18.3 percent over the project’s first five years. Examples of the measures include the proper administering of aspirin, beta blockers and antibiotics; and readmission and mortality rates. Additional research by Premier using the Hospital Compare dataset showed that, by September 2008, HQID participants scored on average 6.4 percentage points higher (95.05 percent to 88.64 percent) than non-participants when evaluating 19 common Hospital Compare measures. |
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