This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Business & Tech

SSM St. Joe's West Receives Top Performance Award

Hospital alliance looked for improved patient care and safety.

in Lake Saint Louis has been distinguished as a high performing hospital by QUEST.  Hospital West is one of six SSM hospitals to receive top performance awards from the Premier Inc. health-care alliance QUEST for improving patient quality and safety in the areas of heart attack, congestive heart failure, pneumonia, and reducing surgical complications, mortality rates and costs for patients.

QUEST is a voluntary, three-year project that measures performance improvement in the foundational elements of healthcare reform, said Dr. Michael Handler, chief medical officer for St. Joseph Hospital West.  The collaborative now includes some 200 hospitals across 34 states that are working to overcome the primary factors that lead to deaths, errors and excessive costs, and to measure themselves against one another to achieve top performance.

Handler said the collaborative focuses on "core measures" that the federal government has instituted to measure hospital performance, including heart attack, congestive heart failure, pneumonia and reducing surgical complications or SCIP (Surgical Care Improvement Project).  That measure attempts to reduce negative outcomes involving surgery such as those that occur with the misuse of antibiotics, catheters, temperature management and the medications used to prevent blood clots.

Interested in local real estate?Subscribe to Patch's new newsletter to be the first to know about open houses, new listings and more.

"QUEST is a collaborative that many hospitals across the country, including the six SSM hospitals in the St. Louis area, are using to help concentrate on those government mandated measures and to aim for top performance," Handler said.  "It also helps reduce the incidence for readmissions and hospital acquired conditions."

Handler said the award shows Hospital West's continued progress toward excellence.  "It is another validation of the exceptional care we're providing to patients," he said.  "Everyone on the hospital's staff and medical staff is focused on continued quality care and to achieve exceptional results for our patients.  We go on the floors now and ask our staff and most of them are working on something relating to the core measures or patient safety."

Interested in local real estate?Subscribe to Patch's new newsletter to be the first to know about open houses, new listings and more.

Premier Inc. healthcare alliance—a performance improvement coalition of more than 2,400 U.S. hospitals and some 70,000 other healthcare sites working together to achieve high quality, cost-effective care for patients—formed QUEST.  Working with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the United Kingdom's National Health Service North West to improve hospital performance, Premier maintains the nation's most comprehensive repository of clinical, financial and outcomes information and operates a leading healthcare purchasing network.

According to Premier's website at www.premierinc.com, "Hospitals participating in the Premier healthcare alliance QUEST High Performing Hospitals national collaborative have saved an estimated 22,164 lives and reduced healthcare spending by $2.13 billion.  If all hospitals in the country had been able to achieve similar results, estimates project an additional 64,000 lives and $23 billion could have been saved."

Other SSM hospitals receiving the designation are SSM DePaul Health Center, Bridgeton; SSM St. Clare Health Center, Fenton; SSM St. Mary's Health Center, Richmond Heights; and St. Mary's Hospital, Centralia, Ill.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?

More from Wentzville