Valley Regional Medical Center is the recipient of a 2022 Patient Safety Excellence Award from Healthgrades. The distinction places Valley Regional Medical Center among the top five percent of all short-term acute care hospitals as evaluated.
Valley Regional Medical Center colleagues protect the safety of their patients with daily safety huddles. It also consistently has real-time systems in place that use data and analytics to identify and manage risks. This includes Sepsis Prediction and Optimization of Therapy (SPOT), an algorithm-driven, real-time system to quickly identify patients with sepsis. This alert system is life-saving for patients and coupled with aggressive sepsis treatment helps save lives.
“The team at Valley Regional Medical Center is committed to doing everything possible to deliver safe and quality care to the patients we serve and improve the health in our community,” said David Irizarry, newly appointed chief executive officer. “I am impressed with and proud of the exceptional doctors, nurses and ancillary colleagues that continuously raise the bar and keep our patients’ safety at the center of all their work.”
“Through our 2022 Patient Safety Excellence Awards, we seek to recognize hospitals that excel in providing top-quality care for their patients while preventing serious injuries during hospital stays,” said Brad Bowman, MD, Chief Medical Officer and head of Data Science, Healthgrades. “We are proud to name Valley Regional Medical Center as a 2022 Patient Safety Excellence Award recipient and look forward to their continued efforts to make patient safety a priority.”
About The Patient Safety Excellence Award
During the study period of 2018 through 2020, 170,231 potentially preventable patient safety events occurred among Medicare patients in U.S. hospitals.* Healthgrades found that just four patient safety indicators accounted for 74 percent of all patient safety events: hip fracture due to an in-hospital fall, collapsed lung resulting from a procedure/surgery, pressure or bed sores acquired in-hospital, and catheter-related bloodstream infections acquired in-hospital. Healthgrades also found that patients treated in hospitals receiving the Healthgrades 2022 Patient Safety Excellence Award were, on average:
- 55.8 percent less likely to experience an in-hospital fall resulting in hip fracture, than patients treated at non-recipient hospitals*
- 52.6 percent less likely to experience a collapsed lung resulting from a procedure or surgery in or around the chest than patients treated at non-recipient hospitals*
- 66.2 percent less likely to experience pressure sores or bed sores acquired in the hospital, than patients treated at non-recipient hospitals*
- 65.8 percent less likely to experience catheter-related bloodstream infections acquired in the hospital, than patients treated at nonrecipient hospitals*
Consumers can visit healthgrades.com for more information on how Healthgrades measures hospital quality and access the complete methodology here.