Healthgrades Honor Puts Hospital in Top 10 Percent of Facilities; Oct. 1 Presentation Set
Carthage Area hospital announced today that it has earned Healthgrades 2018 Labor and Delivery Excellence Award™.
According to Denver-based Healthgrades, the leading online resource for comprehensive information about physicians and hospitals, this distinction places Carthage Area Hospital within the top 10 percent of 1,043 eligible hospitals evaluated for exceptional care of mothers during labor and delivery.
Representatives from Healthgrades will present the hospital with the award during a brief ceremony on Monday, Oct. 1, at 11 a.m. in the obstetrics unit waiting room, 1001 West St., Carthage. Members of the media and elected and public officials are invited and encouraged to attend and should RSVP to Taylour Scanlin, Carthage Hospital marketing director, tscanlin@cahny.org, or 315-519-5211.
“We are proud to continue a legacy of best-in-class personalized maternity and obstetrics care,” Carthage Area Hospital CEO Rich Duvall said. It is a wonderful testament to the hard work and dedication of a highly skilled team of providers and nurses who are invested in delivering quality local maternal care.”
Duvall stressed that the recognition is based on patient experience and clinical outcome, which speaks directly to the quality of the maternity care that the hospital’s obstetrics team provides.
To help consumers evaluate and compare hospital performance in labor and delivery, Healthgrades analyzed patient outcome data for virtually every hospital in the 15 states and the District of Columbia that provide all-payer state data for years 2014 through 2016. Healthgrades found that the variation in hospital performance makes a significant difference in terms of clinical outcomes:
> From 2014 to 2016, if all hospitals included in the analysis performed similarly to those that received the Healthgrades Labor and Delivery Excellence Award, complications could have potentially been avoided for 101,543 patients.*
> From 2014 through 2016, patients treated in hospitals receiving the Labor and Delivery Excellence Award had, on average, a 36.8 percent lower risk of experiencing a complication while in the hospital than if they were treated in hospitals that did not receive the Labor and Delivery Excellence Award.*
> From 2014 to 2016, Carthage Area Hospital’s obstetrics team delivered nearly 375 babies per year while providing an annual average of 708 patient days of care for newborns during the same period.
“Consumers value high-quality outcomes when selecting hospitals, especially with delivery of a child,” said Brad Bowman, MD, Chief Medical Officer at Healthgrades. “Parents have many options when looking for the right providers, and the Healthgrades 2018 Labor and Delivery Excellence Award gives them important insight to find the top hospitals in their areas.”
About Carthage Area Hospital
Carthage Area Hospital’s obstetrics unit last year celebrated the 10th anniversary of a major renovation that transformed its patient rooms into six private labor, delivery, recovery and postpartum suites and two observation suites. Each suite also contains a private bath and shower as well as a daybed for spouses and loved ones to comfortably stay in the room while mothers and newborns recover. Three suites contain whirlpool bathtubs, in which women may labor, while five have private stand-up showers. Also in 2017, the hospital introduced the Newborn Channel, which delivers in-room on-demand postpartum education for mothers and loved ones through a partnership with the Wellness Network.
Carthage Area Hospital was established as a not-for-profit rural community hospital in 1965. It operates today as a fully accredited 25-bed Critical Access Hospital, serving approximately 83,000 residents in Jefferson, northern Lewis and southern St. Lawrence counties. The hospital formed a clinical affiliation with Crouse Health, Syracuse, in 2017.
The hospital also operates a network of community-based clinics, including its Philadelphia Medical Center, Family Health Center, Pediatric Clinic and Women’s Way to Wellness and provides a range of specialty care, including general surgery, orthopedics, podiatry, urology, neurosurgical care, physical and occupational therapy and behavioral health.
* Statistics are based on Healthgrades analysis of all-payer data for years 2014 through 2016 and represent three-year estimates for patients in 15 states and the District of Columbia states for which all-payer data was made available.