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MISSOURI SOUTHERN HEALTHCARE NAMED ONE OF NATION’S TOP HOSPITALS BY SOLUCIENT

DEXTER, MO, March 6, 2006—Missouri Southern Healthcare (MSH) was named one of the nation's 100 Top Hospitals® by Evanston, Ill.-based Solucient®, the nation's leading source of healthcare information products.

The award recognizes hospitals that have achieved excellence in quality of care, operational efficiency, financial performance, and adaptation to the environment. This is thefirst time MSH has been recognized with this honor.

The 13th edition of Solucient’s 100 Top Hospitals: National Benchmarks for Success study appears in the February 27 issue of Modern Healthcare magazine.

“Our staff is committed to providing quality care. This award not only recognizes that, but also recognizes the entire hospital,” said Jim Crawford, Chief Executive Officer. “I am very proud of our staff for this achievement.”

Missouri Southern Healthcare is a 50-bed hospital that has served the Stoddard County and surrounding communities for nearly 30 years. MSH utilizes the services of nearly 70 physicians specializing in pulmonology, emergency medicine, family practice, internal medicine, surgery, pediatrics, cardiology and radiology.

Research Highlights
"The 100 Top Hospital award winners continue to demonstrate significant distinctions in provision of value to their communities, as shown by objective differences in clinical outcomes, patient safety, efficient operations and financial stability," said Jean Chenoweth, senior vice president of Solucient's Center for Healthcare Improvement, which is responsible for the 100 Top Hospitals program. “These top 100 hospitals react quicker to challenges than their peers, and they focus on all aspects of care, not just one.”

Research showed that emergency departments (EDs) at winners of the 100 Top Hospitals National award tend to have a higher percentage of patients requiring more complex treatment or admission to the hospital than EDs at non-winners. Benchmark hospitals were approximately 9 percent more likely to have higher complexity or admitted patients from the ED, after adjusting for hospital region and class.

The 100 Top Hospitals also have better patient safety as indicated by risk-adjusted Patient Safety Indicator (PSI) rates that were significantly lower than non-winners for nine of the 11 PSIs studied.

In addition, benchmark hospitals were also less likely to experience adverse outcomes, also known as medical injuries, than peer hospitals. The presence of any of adverse result, as defined by the PSI list, significantly and negatively impacted the risk of death, patient length of stay (LOS) and cost per case.
Other key findings of the study include:

• If all acute care hospitals performed at the same level as the nation's benchmark hospitals, as many as 106,312 more Medicare patients could survive and an additional 117,000 patient stays could be complication-free each year — at an estimated annual savings of $7.6 billion.
• For the second straight year, the Midwest region was home to the highest number of national benchmark hospitals, confirming a shift from the South, which previously had the highest number of national award winners for nearly a decade.
• For the first time, a hospital — Evanston Northwestern Healthcare, Evanston Ill. — has achieved national benchmark status 11 times.
• Survival rates were higher at benchmark hospitals (96.9 percent) compared to the typical peer hospital (96.2 percent), translating into tens of thousands of lives saved.
• The 100 Top Hospitals treated sicker patients requiring more complex treatment, yet had better patient outcomes and lower costs.
• Salary and benefits were $1,500 per year higher per full-time staff member than at peer hospitals.

The 13th edition of the Solucient 100 Top Hospitals: National Benchmarks for Success study uses a balanced scorecard approach and scores hospitals according to nine key organization-wide measures: risk-adjusted mortality, risk-adjusted complications, patient safety, growth in patient volume, severity-adjusted average length of stay, expense per adjusted discharge, profit from operations, cash to debt ratio and tangible assets per discharge.

More information on this study and other 100 Top Hospitals research is available at www.100tophospitals.com. Copies of the 100 Top Hospitals report can be purchased by calling Solucient at (800) 568-3282 or logging on to www.100tophospitals.com.

Editors Note: Additional information can be found at http://www.100TopHospitals.com under the "Media" tab.