News Release

UPMC NORTHWEST EARNS HOSPITAL LEADERSHIP AWARD

June 14, 2005 — After earning four straight 100 Top Hospitals awards and a place on Solucient’s elite Best of the Benchmark Hospitals list, UPMC Northwest has achieved additional recognition from Solucient.

The 2004 Solucient Performance Improvement Leaders award honors UPMC Northwest’s senior management and board for the hospital’s consistent performance excellence, including its multiple 100 Top Hospitals awards and its recent Best of the Benchmark recognition. The benchmark ranking is limited only to those “best of the best” hospitals that have achieved 100 Top Hospitals recognition four or more times.

The Performance Improvement Leaders award salutes presidents, senior managers and board members who have “instilled a true culture of performance improvement across their entire organizations” over the past five years, Solucient said in presenting the award to UPMC Northwest and 99 other hospitals. “Performance Improvement Leaders, as shown by objective statistical national comparisons, have led their organizations to improve performance consistently, year-over-year, at a substantially faster rate than their peers across the U.S.”

These leaders “accepted the challenge to initiate change, building a culture receptive to improvement, and generated permanent improvement,” says Jean Chenoweth, senior vice president of Solucient’s Center for Healthcare Improvement that is responsible for the 100 Top Hospitals and Performance Improvement Leaders programs. “These are leaders who have brought real value to the community year after year.”

UPMC Northwest’s latest award is “very gratifying recognition” for the hospital and its leadership, according to president Neil Todhunter, who says several years of working together have helped sharpen senior managers’ and board members’ skills and expanded their capacity to lead. “We have solid, seasoned leaders at both the senior management and board levels, and we’ve had very little turnover in either group for some time. Both of these are important reasons why we’ve achieved recognition as a top-performing hospital,” Mr. Todhunter says.

“But our leadership team isn’t the only reason. Our employees, physicians, auxiliary members and volunteers also share the credit for making UPMC Northwest an award-winning hospital.”

Recipients of the Performance Improvement Leaders award are chosen based on their organizations’ improvement in various measures including patient care, operational, and financial performance, according to Solucient, a leading provider of strategic business and clinical information for health care organizations.

In a study that produced its second annual Performance Improvement Leaders awards, Solucient found that the award-winning hospitals had fewer deaths, complications, and adverse safety events than expected, they improved profitability, discharged patients three-quarters of a day sooner, and increased spending at a much lower rate than non-winning hospitals.

Solucient says the study, which looked at more than 6,000 U.S. hospitals licensed to treat Medicare patients, leads to a question of whether real, long-term improvement in hospital performance is possible. “The answer is a resounding yes,” Solucient says. Although most hospitals didn’t appreciably advance their performance during the five-year study period, “the 2004 Performance Improvement Leaders have shown a clear ability to improve.”

Ms. Chenoweth says the study is a “major step forward in objectively measuring the impact a superior management team can have on an organization over time by instilling a culture of change.” The award-winning hospitals “are in a position to thrive” as various factors continue to change the health care industry, she says.

UPMC Northwest is one of only three Pennsylvania hospitals to earn a Performance Improvement Leaders award this year, and one of only 20 medium-sized community hospitals (100 to 249 beds) nationwide to do so. Other recipients of this year’s Performance Improvement Leaders awards are 15 major teaching hospitals and 25 teaching hospitals (mostly metropolitan and university medical centers), 20 large community hospitals (more than 250 beds), and 20 small community hospitals (fewer than 100 beds).

Coverage of the Performance Improvement Leaders awards and a list of the award-winning hospitals were published in a recent issue of Modern Healthcare magazine.