Mercy Health Partners Community Hospital Chief Executive Officer Jack Bryan announced today that St. Mary’s Medical Center of Campbell County and St. Mary’s Jefferson Memorial Hospital have been honored with the National Benchmarks Award on the 2008 Thomson Reuters list of 100 Top Hospitals.  

Both hospitals were also selected to be two of only 23 facilities in the nation to receive the inaugural Everest Award from Thomson Reuters.  The Thomson Reuters 100 Top Hospital’s Everest Award recognizes hospital leaders who have developed and executed strategies that drove the highest rate of long-term improvements during the past five years. 

“These awards acknowledge the hard work and tremendous dedication of the doctors, staff and management at these facilities in providing the highest quality healthcare services to the communities they serve,” Bryan said.   

“Five critical areas of performance are measured by Thomson Reuters in evaluating hospitals including clinical processes and outcomes, patient safety, patient perception of care, operational efficiency and financial stability.  The award-winning performance at these two Mercy hospitals shows that they are providing the best in evidence-based medical services while also responding to patient needs in a caring and timely manner,” Bryan added. 

This is the second year in a row that St. Mary’s Medical Center of Campbell County has won this Top 100 award.   

“Winning this Top 100 designation twice is strong evidence of the commitment to quality care by the board, doctors, associates and volunteers at St. Mary’s Medical Center of Campbell County,” said Alan Watson, chief administrative officer at the LaFollette hospital.  “The medical staff and associates here are dedicated to improving this already high quality healthcare so that the people of  Campbell and surrounding counties can receive the best in medical care while staying close to home.” 

New St. Mary’s Jefferson Memorial Hospital Chief Administrative Officer David Bunch saluted the staff in 2008 for winning this award and plans to improve the Top 100 performance level in the years to come. 

“The nine measures of hospital performance included in the award process are metrics which reach across our entire organization and factors that affect both the patient and the community,” Bunch said.  “The citizens in this area can continue to rely on Jefferson Memorial to be a well-managed employer and partner in the community as we strive to constantly promote the highest levels of quality and continue to invest in new technology and services. 

“To be the recipient of the inaugural Everest Award for National Benchmarks is gratifying to everyone within our hospital and the larger health system.  Being selected, along with our sister facility, St. Mary's Medical Center of Campbell County, as two of only 23 hospitals nationwide to receive this distinction is encouraging because it means we are consistently delivering a higher quality level of patient care while optimizing operational performance,” Bunch added. 

To conduct the 100 Top Hospitals study, Thomson Reuters researchers evaluated 3,000 short-term, acute care, non-federal hospitals. They used public information, including Medicare cost reports, Medicare Provider Analysis and Review (MedPAR) data, and core measures and patient satisfaction data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Hospital Compare data set, to develop the 100 Top Hospitals list.

Mercy Health Partners was formed by the merger of St. Mary’s Health System and Baptist Health System of East Tennessee in 2008.  The new healthcare system operates seven acute-care hospitals and many other healthcare facilities across East Tennessee.  More than 1,000 of the area’s leading physicians on the medical staff at Mercy facilities. One of East Tennessee’s largest employers, Mercy has 5,700 associates dedicated to providing compassionate care using the latest medical technology. 

St. Mary’s Jefferson Memorial Hospital is a 58-bed acute care facility with nearly 250 associates located in Jefferson City, Tennessee.  St. Mary’s Medical Center of Campbell County employs approximately 375 people in the 66-bed hospital in La Follette.