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$30 million in recent construction keeps the award-winning rural hospital in Danville competitive.

By one measure, the top-ranked hospital in Arkansas is one many people know almost nothing about.

An annual national ranking of 100 Top Hospitals performed by Thomson Healthcare groups hospitals into five categories: Major Teaching Hospitals, Teaching Hospitals, Large Community Hospitals, Medium Community Hospitals and Small Community Hospitals. The top 20 performers across the nation in each category make up the “100 Top Hospitals: National Benchmarks for Success list”.

The only hospital in Arkansas to place among the top 100 is John Ed Chambers Memorial Hospital in Danville, which placed in the Small Community Hospitals category.

What’s more, this isn’t the first time the 41-bed hospital has made the cut. Chambers Memorial is one of only a few hospitals in the nation to make the list every year for the past five consecutive years.

“We were pretty surprised the first time we received the award. We did a little checking, and I don’t know that there’s another facility in the state of Arkansas that has received this award in recent years,” CEO Scott Peek said. “We were surprised to receive it, and then to receive it five years in a row, that’s just a testament to the board, the employees and the physicians we have.”

Peek explained that inclusion on the list is based on a variety of objective data every hospital reports. “It’s not something you apply for,” he said. “They look at the data of every hospital in the nation and rank them on that.”

Now in its fifteenth year, the study examines changing performance levels in U.S. hospitals and objectively identifies 100 benchmark hospitals based on their overall organizational performance. It ranks hospitals based on their performance in eight key clinical and financial areas: risk-adjusted mortality, risk-adjusted complications, patient safety composite, average core measures scores, severity-adjusted average length of stay, expense per adjusted discharge, profit from operations and cash-to-debt ratio.

Peek said continuity of care and of leadership has played a large role in the hospital’s performance over the years. “We’ve not had much turnover among our department heads or our physician staff in a long time. We’ve had the same group of physicians and department leaders for about 10, 12, 14 years. They’re a good group of people, very dedicated to the hospital and to the patients, and we all get along very well. I think that makes a big difference.”

Peek himself will celebrate 25 years at the hospital this year. He has seen it grow considerably in that time from a 64-employee hospital to one that now employs 225.

“Revenue-wise, we’re growing quite a bit, too,” Peek said, disclosing that the past fiscal year has seen about a 16 percent growth in hospital revenue.

“We’ve done well financially, but we’re also putting it back into the facility,” he continued. “In the past 12 years, we’ve spent close to $30 million on new construction and equipment.”

Chambers is about to complete a $13 million renovation, which includes all-private rooms, expanded endoscopy and business office areas, and a relocated main entrance of the hospital from the west side to the east side.

The rural hospital serves a patient base of around 25,000 people, including the approximately 2,400 who live in Danville, the seat of Yell County. The main industry of the small town located about 30 miles south of Russellville is represented by two large poultry processing plants that together employ close to 1,500 residents, many of them Hispanic workers who relocated to the area for the work. Chambers Memorial now employs four full-time interpreters and has a number of other bilingual employees to meet the needs of its changing patient base.

The hospital has about 26 physicians, nine of whom are admitting. Peek recently recruited for the first time in years two additional physicians. One is slated to begin this summer and the other, through a Community Match program, in August 2009.

Peek said one key element for Chambers’ financial stability has been resisting the industry push toward moving into the outpatient market. “Really, the margin for our hospital is with inpatients. You have to have a certain number of inpatients to be able to survive as a small community hospital. That’s one thing you can’t give up. You can’t make up the difference on the outpatient side of things because the reimbursement sometimes doesn’t even cover the costs.”

Increasing overall quality and patient outcomes is about going back to the basics, Peek said. While quality buzzwords change, he said, “You know the old theory. If you take care of the patient, everything else pretty much takes care of itself.

Taking care of the physicians is also important.

“It goes without saying that you’ve got to have a good relationship with your physician staff. Having good physicians who are invested in the community and the hospital, with little to no turnover, has helped us a lot.”

The private, non-profit hospital is run by a seven-member board, which has similarly low turnover rates. Several members have been on the board more than 20 years, and one has served it continuously for more than 30. “Our board has been together a long time. You get consistency and continuity with that, too,” Peek said.

Materials from Thomson say the 100 Top Hospitals maintain financial stability while having higher survival rates, keeping more patients complication-free and attracting more patients. The Web site reads: “We estimate that if all Medicare inpatients received the same level of care as those in the 100 Top Hospitals winners:

• More than 120,000 additional patients would survive each year
• More than 138,000 patient complications would be avoided annually
• Expenses would decline by an aggregate $6.2 billion a year
• The average patient stay would decrease by more than half a day”

The winning hospitals also typically have better patient safety and reward their employees with better pay, the Web site says.

Two sister studies by Thomson Healthcare are “100 Top Hospitals: Cardiovascular Benchmarks for Success” and “Performance Improvement Leaders”. No Arkansas hospitals placed on the 2007 cardiovascular list, but Mountain Home’s Baxter Regional Medical Center did make the 2006 Performance Improvement Leader list.

“I just appreciate my board and the physicians and employees,” Peek said. “We tell every employee we hire that we’re a service business and that we make a difference because they give compassionate care to the patients. That’s really what it’s all about, just keeping the basics in mind and doing our jobs well.”

Further information about the study and a complete list of 2007’s winning hospitals can be found at www.100tophospitals.com.




June 2008

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