Three-peat: Wooster Community Hospital named to Thomson Top 100 for a third straight year

For the third time in as many years, Wooster Community Hospital has been honored by Thomson Reuters Healthcare as one of the 100 Top Hospitals in the United States.Each year Thomson Reuters rates hospitals on a broad range of criteria including patient safety, patient outcomes, national treatment standards, patient satisfaction, efficiency and financial stability using data extracted from existing publicly available information.With roughly 5,000 hospitals in the nation, those named to the 100 Top Hospitals list represent the top two percent of hospitals in the country.Wooster Hospital was selected as one of only 20 hospitals in the medium (100-250 beds) community hospital category. With approximately 1,100 hospitals, the highly competitive medium community hospital category is the largest subset of the study group, which places Wooster Hospital’s ranking amongst its peers at a fraction of that top two percent.By winning the award three years in a row, Wooster Hospital is in some very elite company.According to Wooster Hospital CEO Bill Sheron, only four community hospitals in the country and just three hospitals of any size in Ohio have won the award for the last three years.“It’s a huge achievement for us,” said Sheron. “It validates the great job everybody does – doctors, employees, board – everybody.“As a hospital administrator there is nothing I’d rather win more than this award,” said Sheron, noting “of all the awards this is the most balanced. This takes into account clinical care, safety, financial, efficiency, patient satisfaction- across the board.“This is our Super Bowl, our Academy Awards,” said Sheron. “This is the award we want to win. This is the one we aspire to.”According to Sheron, the criteria for being selected for the award includes “not only your performance data but also your rate of improvement over time,” which makes it increasingly difficult to be a repeat winner.“Once you’re really good, to make significant improvement beyond that is a whole lot harder,” observed Sheron.Because Thomson Reuters frequently adjusts the indicators that it looks at in making its selections it’s also not the type of award that a hospital can actively try to win by making adjustments to its operations to meet the award’s criteria.“It’s not a static award. The indicators they use change,” said Sheron. For example “this year they took out cash to debt ratio, which was our best indicator, but they brought in two new (post discharge) indicators…and we still won.”Winning this prestigious national award three years in a row “shows consistency and improvement over time,” Sheron said. “It really shows excellence - excellence across the board in every benchmark.“For the community it makes a very strong statement that we have one of the best hospitals in the country right here in Wooster. And not just this year. It’s been three years in a row,” said Sheron.According to information released by Thomson Reuters, receiving this award “means this hospital is significantly more likely to provide dependable, high-quality care because doing the right thing at the right time matters to everyone in the hospital,” and that “our research has shown that hospitals that win this award three or more times have particularly high levels of performance over many years.”Other hospitals across the country have taken notice of Wooster Hospital’s success as a three-time award winner.In mid-April, a top delegation from the Thibodaux Louisiana Regional Medical Center traveled to Wooster to spend the day benchmarking with the Wooster Hospital staff “to learn about this award, how we did it, what it means, maybe how they can do it,” said Sheron.