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St. John’s Mercy Medical Center Ranked Best in the St. Louis Area in Patient Satisfaction St. John’s Mercy Medical Center ranked best in the St. Louis area in patient satisfaction scores released in March 2008 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Following is the text from the March 29 Post-Dispatch. St. John’s Mercy Noted For Patient Satisfaction WASHINGTON — A high score for St. John’s Mercy Medical Center in Creve Coeur for patient satisfaction was among new information released Friday on the quality and cost of care in hospitals nationwide. The data include numbers of specifi c procedures done at each hospital, satisfaction levels of patients and costs of certain treatments. The information is available at www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov, a website of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The secretary of the department, Michael Leavitt, said the goal of collecting and presenting the data is to ultimately change the way hospitals receive funding to better refl ect their quality of care. “We pay the same whether the care is good or whether it is not good,” Leavitt said in a speech at the Association of Health Care Journalists conference outside Washington. For now, the data give patients new ways to compare hospitals and could eventually lead to penalties for poor performers and even changes in hospital administrators’ salaries, Leavitt said. The patient satisfaction information that resulted in the high score for St. John’s Mercy was supplied voluntarily by most of the hospitals in the country. It comes from standardized surveys that include questions on how well patients understood their treatments, how respectfully they were treated and how clean their rooms and bathrooms were. “Patients’ perspective on care is actually a critical part of what we call quality of care,” said Carolynn Clancy, director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Of patients surveyed at St. John’s Mercy, 80 percent said they would recommend the hospital to friends and family. The score was the highest among local hospitals included in the data. The national average is 67 percent. Denny DeNarvaez, the hospital’s president and CEO, said the hospital takes a “total healing environment” approach to patient care and pointed to programs like scheduled nap times on each fl oor and massage therapy for cancer patients. “What we’ve noticed is a reduction in their pain medications and a reduction in their length of stay,” DeNarvaez said. “The patients are our number one priority and we really walk the talk.” Patients at Christian Hospital in north St. Louis County gave the hospital the area’s lowest scores for overall satisfaction, with 53 percent giving the hospital a 9 or 10 on a 10-point scale. The national average is 63 percent. Spokesman Bret Berigan said the hospital’s top goal for this year is to improve patient satisfaction. Medicare also added information on how much the government insurer pays hospitals for certain procedures and how often hospitals performed them. For patients with diabetes or who had a heart attack, the St. Louis area hospitals with the highest payment rates were teaching hospitals that get paid extra to host medical education programs. St. Louis University Hospital was paid the most, $7,580 for a patient suffering a heart attack without complications, and $5,822 for a patient with diabetes. In Missouri, most hospitals received around $5,000 to care for patients who had heart attacks and around $4,000 to care for patients with diabetes. Barnes-Jewish Hospital in the Central West End performed the most of both types of care. Many area hospitals performed too few procedures to be considered statistically significant. Research hospitals that perform a procedure more often tend to have better outcomes. The new information joins already available data on hospitals’ success at treating heart attacks and other conditions.
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Sisters of Mercy Health System
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