Goodall-Witcher Named with Top 100 Hospitals

Earns 2004 Solucient Improvement Leader Award

Goodall-Witcher Healthcare Foundation has been selected for the 2004 Solucient Performance Improvement Leaders award. Modern Healthcare and Solucient announced the selections on Monday, April 25, in Modern Healthcare magazine.

“It is a tremendous honor to be selected for this award,” said Clarence Fields, President/CEO. “It was a team effort. Our medical staff, board of trustees, and employees of Goodall-Witcher are working to make the hospital better.”

Goodall-Witcher Healthcare Foundation was selected as one of the top 20 in its small community hospitals group. The foundation was one of three in its group from Texas.

This year’s performance improvement leaders have lower mortality rates, shorter lengths of stay, and lower expenses compared with a peer group of U.S. hospitals. More than 800 study elements for over 6,000 U.S. acute care and specialty hospitals were collected.

The study found that the medium and small performance leader hospitals improved at a faster rate than larger hospitals and national averages. Small hospitals increased their average operating profit margin by 8.1 percent from a negative 3.63 percent to 4.45 percent, compared with their peer group which dropped in the overall margin by nearly two-tenths of a percentage point from 1.53 percent in 1999 to 1.36 percent in 2003.

Fields attributes Goodall-Witcher’s improvement to cost containment and revenue enhancement. He cited the hospital becoming a sole community hospital under Medicare in April 2000 as having the biggest impact to the hospital’s operations, as well as focusing on improvements in safety within the organization.

Solucient’s 100 Top Hospitals®: Performance Improvement Leaders study is designed to identify hospital leaders — CEOs, executive teams, and boards — that have installed a true culture of performance improvement across their organization over five consecutive years (1999-2003). Performance Improvement Leaders, as shown by objective statistical national comparisons, have led their organizations to improve overall performance consistently, year-over-year, at a substantially faster rate than peers across the U.S.

The PI Leaders study is the first to measure the rate of hospital-wide performance improvement nationally, based on both management and clinical outcomes over five consecutive years. The PI Leaders study measures based on hospital size and teaching status reflect improvement in five categories: clinical outcomes, patient safety, efficiency, financial stability, and growth.