SMH Again Earns Highest CMS 5-Star Rating

Less than 8% of the US hospitals earned the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ 5-Star rating in 2019 for Overall Quality & Safety

Report cards are out for the nation’s hospitals, and Sarasota Memorial Hospital again received the highest 5-star rating. It is the only hospital in Florida — and one of just 52 across the nation — to consistently earn the federal government’s highest quality rating for the fifth consecutive rating period, since the star program’s inception in 2016.

Of 3,724 U.S. hospitals evaluated, less than 8 percent earned the federal government’s highest rating in the February 2019 update on the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Hospital Compare website. Like previous years, most hospitals received two, three or four stars.

Since 2016, the federal agency has shared star ratings to make it easier for people to compare how well their community hospitals perform on a range of inpatient and outpatient quality indicators. Comparisons are made based on patient experience, the timeliness and effectiveness of care, complication rates, and other factors. Information is also organized by medical condition, such as heart attack, pneumonia, or type of surgery. Hospital Compare then distills 50-plus quality measures into an overall star rating, giving the most weight to factors including patient safety, patient experience, the rates of unnecessary patient readmissions and rates of unexpected patient deaths. 

Earlier this week, Sarasota Memorial also was named one of the nation’s 100 Top Hospitals by IBM Watson Health. The prestigious list of top hospitals were chosen from 2,752 hospitals across the country that outperformed peer-group hospitals on all clinical and operational performance benchmarks evaluated in the study, including: inpatient mortality and complications, healthcare-associated infections, readmission rates, length of stay, costs of care and patient satisfaction. If all hospitals were to achieve the same performance benchmarks as those included on this year’s list, IBM Watson Health projects it would save 103,000 lives, prevent complications in 38,000 patients, result in 155,000 fewer hospital readmissions and lead to 12 percent lower medical bills than the average patient receiving care.