Best Hospitals 2006 -- U.S.News

The latest issue of USNews & World Report "America's Best Hospitals" will hit newsstands this week. Not surprisingly, University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics is ranked yet again. UI Hospitals and Clinics have been ranked every year since the magazine began ranking U.S. hospitals 17 years ago.  

Donna Katen-Bahensky, Director and Chief Executive Officer, says UI Hospitals and Clinics, did very well. "We had listings in Otolaryngology, Gynecology, Kidney Disease, Orthopaedics, Urology, and Ophthalmology, all very big names, but three of those have been in our top 10 for the 17 years that we've been ranked, and we're very, very proud of that, but we have retained, and actually have gone up significantly in a couple of these areas."  

Seventeen years is certainly a testimony to what's being done right at UI Hospitals and Clinics. "They rank these based on reputation, your mortality or your death rate, and other issues such as nursing and patient services, and one variable that I think many people do not recognize is that Magnet hospital designation is also a part of this and we are a Magnet hospital for nursing," she says.

"They look at each of the specialty areas. You have to have a minimum number of patients you've seen in a certain period of time in that particular specialty area; then they calculate a hospital quality index looking at things like outcomes and process; and then they look at your environmental factors, like Magnet, the American Hospital Association data; and then finally, they send out surveys to physicians in your own specialty area and ask 'where are the best of the best?'

"I'm a person who doesn't believe that you should choose a hospital based solely on rankings, but I do believe it should be taken into consideration when one considers that they're also looking at quality, not just reputation. I think the most important thing here is the recognition of the outstanding faculty and staff that we have here at UI Hospitals and Clinics.

"You can't ever settle set on your laurels," she says. "Continuous improvement is what this is all about. We continue to look at the outcomes data. We also are looking at some international data on quality improvement and how we might be able to rank there.

"We look quarterly at all of the quality and outcomes data, not necessarily just for rankings," she says.

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