Best cardiovascular hospitals in 2019: New York, North Carolina institutions top list
IBM Watson Health has released its annual 50 Top Cardiovascular Hospitals Study, marking the 20th year the healthcare company has ranked the best-performing cardiovascular teaching and community hospitals in the U.S.
Watson Health studies public data and stratifies its winners by three separate peer groups, including teaching hospitals with cardiovascular residency programs, teaching hospitals without cardiovascular residency programs and community hospitals. The company doesn’t publicly rank its top performers against one another, instead listing them alphabetically.
According to the 2019 report, Watson Health’s research is “designed to put impartial, action-driving and attainable benchmarks in the spotlight for hospital and clinical leaders across the country to leverage as they work to raise their own organizations’ standards of performance.”
The report, which considered data from Medicare cost reports and CMS, revealed 15 each of the top-ranked teaching hospitals with and without cardiac residencies and 20 of the top-ranking community cardiovascular hospitals in the U.S. Analysts considered performance measures like readmission rates, mortalities, complications, hospital costs and average lengths of stay.
Though Watson Health didn’t disclose the order of its rankings, four institutions in its top 15 teaching hospitals with cardiovascular residency programs are based in New York, including Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, Southside Hospital in Bay Shore and two branches of the NewYork-Presbyterian group in Queens and Brooklyn.
Other hospitals included Duke Regional and Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in North Carolina, Northwestern Memorial in Chicago and Tulane Medical Center in New Orleans. Winners spanned 10 states.
Hospitals included in the top 15 teaching institutions without cardiovascular research programs extended to 11 states, including two hospitals in North Carolina, two in Illinois, two in Tennessee and two in Florida. Other winners hailed from hospitals in Wisconsin, Virginia, Maine, Michigan and California, to name a few.
Institutions in North Carolina and Texas dominated the list of highest-performing community cardiovascular hospitals, with other frequent appearances from practices in Tennessee and Indiana. Oklahoma Heart Hospital North Campus in Oklahoma City was the state’s only representative across the three lists, and Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque was New Mexico’s only showing. The same went for Saint Mary’s in Reno, Nevada, and Salem Hospital in Oregon.
According to Watson Health, in comparison with non-winning cardiovascular hospitals, winners in the 2019 study had between 28 and 47 percent higher inpatient survival, 16 to 24 percent fewer patient complications, higher 30-day survival rates for acute MI patients and lower readmission rates for acute MI, heart failure and coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) patients.
Top-ranked hospitals also spent $1,635 to $7,812 less in total costs per patient and $883 to $1,208 less per 30-day episode of care payments for acute MI and heart failure patients.
If all cardiac hospitals performed at the level of this year’s winners, Watson Health claims more than 10,300 more lives could be saved, more than 2,800 heart patients could be complication-free and hospitals could save more than $1.8 billion.
“The study is far more than a list,” the report reads. “Since our cardiovascular award winners have achieved an outstanding balance of clinical and operational excellence in a complex and changing landscape, we believe their success can help provide a clear and bright path for others to follow.”
Watson Health’s full report, rankings and methodology can be found here.
After graduating from Indiana University-Bloomington with a bachelor’s in journalism, Anicka joined TriMed’s Chicago team in 2017 covering cardiology. Close to her heart is long-form journalism, Pilot G-2 pens, dark chocolate and her dog Harper Lee.