ALMH among nation's best rural hospitals

[March 19, 2013]  Abraham Lincoln Memorial Hospital has been recognized by iVantage Health Analytics as one of the nation's 100 best-performing critical-access hospitals. The honor is based on iVantage's Hospital Strength Index and its measures of market conditions, clinical and operational performance, and financial and qualitative outcomes.

"We are excited and proud to have earned this national recognition based on our performance," said Dolan Dalpoas, the hospital's president and chief executive officer. "Our employees, physicians and volunteers work together to serve the needs of our patients, and have earned this honor through their commitment to improve the health of the people and communities we serve."

Findings of the iVantage Health Analytics' study on the nation's critical-access hospitals shed new, multidimensional light on the characteristics of the 100 top-performing critical-access hospitals. The 2013 "Benchmark Performance for Critical Access Hospitals" study is a trending study of the rural hospital industry. Key findings from the study include:

• Top 100 critical-access hospitals, or CAHs, perform as well or better at the median overall than the full census of all U.S. general acute-care hospitals.

• Top 100 CAHs face the least population-based demand for future health care services, while their quality is near the top quartile when compared with all U.S. general acute care hospitals.

• Top 100 CAH performance is in the top quartile of all U.S. general acute-care hospitals in the financial and cost and charge categories of the study.

"Small and rural hospitals play a critical role in providing efficient and effective health care that is on par with other larger suburban and urban counterparts," said John Morrow, executive vice president of iVantage Health Analytics Inc. "Rural hospitals have new and difficult demands that are best managed with actionable information.

"The Hospital Strength Index reflects the multiple challenges of running a hospital by incorporating the measures on which the industry has worked to gain consensus and standardization," he said.

The Hospital Strength Index ranks all of the nation's more than 4,400 general acute-care hospitals, including more than 1,300 critical-access hospitals. The index is based on eight performance categories measuring 56 different performance metrics. The index offers hospital executives, trustees and boards of directors an objective way to measure their relative performance internally and among their peers.

"Measuring the effectiveness of our care delivery processes and patient outcomes is vital to improving the quality of care we provide to every patient, every day," Dalpoas said. "For our performance to be measured against all others and to be recognized through this analysis as one of the nation's best rural safety net health care facilities provides the people of Lincoln and the greater Logan County region with another important assurance of the high-quality health care services that are available to them at Abraham Lincoln Memorial Hospital."

[Text from file received from Abraham Lincoln Memorial Hospital]