Citrus Memorial

Citrus Memorial Among Top 5% in Nation for Patient Safety

2011-03-10T06:43:00.000-08:00

Citrus Memorial hospital was identified as a recipient of the 2011 HealthGrades Patient Safety Excellence Award™, indicating that its patient safety ratings are in the top 5% of U.S. hospitals. In a new study released by HealthGrades, the nation's most trusted source of health care provider information, Citrus Memorial is one of only 268 hospitals in the country to receive this designation.

The study finds that Medicare patients at Patient Safety Excellence Award hospitals were 46.26% less likely to experience a patient safety event during the time period studied. In addition, if all hospitals performed at this level of distinction as Citrus Memorial approximately 174,358 patient safety events and 20,688 Medicare deaths could have been avoided while saving the federal government approximately $1.8 billion in excess healthcare costs from 2007 – 2009.

The eighth annual HealthGrades Patient Safety in American Hospitals study analyzed nearly 40 million hospitalization records from approximately 5,000 hospitals nationwide that participate in the Medicare program. Participation in the HealthGrades study is not voluntary, and hospitals cannot choose to opt out of the analysis.

Citrus Memorial CEO Ryan Beaty credits the dedicated staff of physicians, nurses, techs and therapists with the hospital’s ability to provide great outcomes. He said, “Our ability to provide our patients with the safest care possible is a direct result of our skilled staff. They really care about the quality of care patients receive from the time they enter the door to the time they’ve completed therapy or home healthcare. They are to be commended for a job well done.”

“We’ve seen great advances in medical care in the last few decades, but along with these miraculous advances come greater and greater risks. Hospitals like Citrus Memorial have shown definitively that it is possible to provide the best in medical care while still focusing on the safety of the patient,” said Rick May, MD, vice president of Clinical Quality Improvement at HealthGrades and co-author of the study.

The eighth annual HealthGrades Patient Safety in American Hospitals Study evaluates patient safety in U.S. hospitals. HeathGrades used Medicare inpatient data from the Medicare Provider Analysis and Review (MedPAR) database and Patient Safety Indicator software from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to calculate event rates for 13 indicators of patient safety for all of the nation’s hospitals. All analysis was based on data from 2007 to 2009 with the exception of Foreign Body Left After a Procedure which was based only on data from 2009. These indicators identify the best-performing hospitals, or Patient Safety Excellence Award™ Hospitals, which represent the top 5% of all U.S. hospitals. HealthGrades developed this award to give patients more information about choosing a hospital.

In the HealthGrades analysis, the following are the patient safety indicators studied:

• Foreign body left in after procedure
• Death in low mortality Diagnostic Related Groupings (DRGs)
• Pressure ulcer (bed sores)
• Death among surgical inpatients with serious treatable complications (previously known as “Failure to Rescue”)
• Iatrogenic pneumothorax (collapsed lung)
• Catheter-related bloodstream infections
• Post-operative hip fracture
• Post-operative hemorrhage or hematoma
• Post-operative physiologic and metabolic derangements
• Post-operative respiratory failure
• Post-operative pulmonary embolism or deep vein thrombosis
• Post-operative sepsis
• Post-operative abdominal wound dehiscence

About Citrus Memorial Health System
Citrus Memorial Health System is a 198 bed, private not-for-profit community hospital that provides healthcare services to residents of Citrus County and surrounding communities. More than 150 physicians and 1,000 employees provide a wide range of services at the Inverness campus and at medical offices and clinics in Citrus and Sumter Counties. Citrus Memorial is fully accredited by the Joint Commission and is fully licensed by the State of Florida.

Citrus Memorial Undertaking Electronic Health Initiative

2011-01-13T09:45:00.000-08:00

Government efforts to bring higher quality and safer care to patients through broad adoption of health information technology have enjoyed bipartisan support for many years. Citrus Memorial hospital is helping bring this vision to reality by joining the ranks of hospitals and healthcare providers across the nation who are enthusiastically embracing the benefits of electronic health records and other forms of health information technology.

Citrus Memorial is registering with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to demonstrate its intent to become a “meaningful user” of electronic health records. Thanks to incentive funding of up to $27 billion over 10 years included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, Health and Human Services is able to offer technical and financial assistance as it guides a national effort to encourage more hospitals and doctors to adopt electronic health records over the next few years.

Citrus Memorial is eager to participate in this historic opportunity because we believe that electronic health records will provide a number of advantages to our patients, including access by doctors to their patients’ complete health picture, better care coordination and fewer repetitive tests as providers share information, and ultimately savings in time and money.

We encourage other hospitals and physicians to join Citrus Memorial Health System in bringing healthcare into the 21^st century, so that the entire country will be able to enjoy the benefits of widespread adoption and use of electronic health records. Meaningful use of health information technology is in the best interest of patients, healthcare providers, and the nation.

-Katie Mehl, Public Relations Coordinator

Stroke Support Group Gains Momentum

2010-12-20T13:28:00.000-08:00

The Citrus Memorial Stroke Support Group held its fourth meeting in December, complete with a special holiday social for participants. We had treats, music and small gifts and many hospital staff members from the Stroke Program Committee attended or stopped by to wish our participants a happy holiday, as well.

Our group continues to grow and we now have a total of four stroke survivors and four caregiver/support individuals who are attending. The greatest compliment to the group is that they are consistently returning and new members are coming with each meeting. They have all said that they look forward to this monthly and each of them continues to make progress in their own way. Not only that, but they have found numerous ways to support each other with inspirational and motivational discussions and the offering of resources to assist each other with mobility.

If you know of anyone who could benefit from our Stroke Support Group, please send them our way! The group meets on the third Wednesday of every month in our Annex Building and is open to the public. Those interested can call 344-6596 for information, but an RSVP isn’t necessary.

Cheryl Love, Director of Nursing Practice

Care for All: Treating our Neighbors in Homosassa

2010-12-16T06:48:00.000-08:00

We're pleased to announce our recent collaboration with the We Care Food Pantry and Citrus County Transit to better serve the Homosassa area’s homeless and needy population. Effective January 18, 2011, Citrus Memorial Health System and Citrus County Transit will partner with the We Care Food Pantry in a pilot program to provide primary care for Homosassa’s uninsured and homeless.

The program will focus on preventive healthcare with family care and diagnostic testing as program components. Specialty care will not be offered initially, but may be added as specialty physicians are made aware of the opportunity.

We Care and the Department of Children and Families staff will assist the homeless and indigent who need healthcare services by completing Citrus Memorial intake forms and Hospital Sponsored Care forms at the We Care Food Pantry. Once patients are pre-registered through this process, We Care staff will coordinate and schedule individuals for transportation to Citrus Memorial’s nearby facility.

At Citrus Memorial Healthcare Center at Sugarmill Woods, primary care services will be provided to patients with Medicaid and to those who have qualified for Hospital Sponsored Care. Each patient will receive a full physical and orders for follow-up diagnostic testing as required.

Citrus County Transit will provide transportation every Tuesday for initial appointments, and on Thursdays for diagnostic testing. Many of the potential patients we will target are not aware of the services they qualify for; many do not have transportation to get to a clinic.

We hope that through this effort, we will be able to improve the health and quality of life for our neighbors in Homosassa.

-Katie Mehl, Public Relations

C21: Citrus for the 21st Century

2010-08-19T06:35:00.001-07:00

Citrus Memorial Health System has moved into the 21st century by making great strides in the delivery of healthcare to our patients. We’ve had some amazing achievements this year including our Healthgrades awards in Orthopedics and Spine Surgery, being named to the HomeCare Elite and achieving Primary Stroke Center status from the Joint Commission.

But, there’s one improvement you may not have heard much about, and that’s C21. The C21 project is our implementation of an enterprise-wide electronic health record. Let me provide some of the history. Citrus Memorial conducted an extensive search of information system vendors with the objective of providing an electronic health record system while reducing the total cost to operate the system. A committee was formed and many employees, including physicians, reviewed the vendor’s systems. After a lengthy analysis, the committee selected McKesson Provider Technologies.

Last winter, project teams were formed and they started building a new information system for Citrus Memorial. It’s a long process. Imaging building the pathway you would follow when you browse through the Internet.

The C21 project will result in an enterprise electronic health record. All patient records will be stored electronically. Not scanned or copied, but stored electronically. Clinicians or those authorized can search on every word or digit in the patient’s record. A patient’s data, from previous hospital visits can be viewed and even combined to see a trend. Orders, results, notes, and other components of the patient’s record will be recorded using the computer systems that the project teams are building. The new system will improve patient safety, quality of care and provide more reliable record keeping.

This new enterprise electronic health record will affect nearly every department at Citrus Memorial.

The electronic records system has been implemented in Home Health and on September 1st CPC Inverness will have the new system in their office. January 24, 2011 is the “go live” date for all inpatients, outpatients, and emergency patients in the hospital.

-Jim Meister, Director of Information Systems

Orthopedic Excellence

2010-08-18T11:09:00.000-07:00

Most greatness is achieved by people in art, science or medicine. Certainly technology plays its part, and often a great need like war or the need to watch You-tube while waiting in line at the bank can stimulate huge leaps in technology that are great in themselves, but certainly no cell phone to date has invented itself.

At Citrus Memorial, being in the top five percent in the nation for orthopedics and spine surgery means a lot of people have exceeded our expectations and worked hard to create an environment where above average is the minimum we will accept. From our Joint Academy, where patients are educated about their procedure and given a chance to meet the staff who will be caring for them; to our professionals in the operating room who have more than a combined century of experience; to the nurses in the dedicated Orthopedic unit who know exactly what an orthopedic patient needs; our team is the perfect combination of style and substance. Exactly what a patient needs to have the best possible chance at a perfect outcome.

Of course we have the technology, too, and our staff and surgeons work hard to stay current on techniques and equipment so that we can offer our patients the very latest in minimally invasive joint replacement, minimally invasive spinal surgery and fracture management. We recently acquired a Hana table. The table is a positioning device that allows surgeons to perform total hip replacements with the minimal possible incision, allowing patients to return much more quickly to the active lifestyle they desire. And, Dr Eric Hirsch is now performing Hip Resurfacing, a joint sparing technique for younger patients that have pain but aren’t quite ready for a complete joint replacement.

Citrus Memorial is obviously a leader in Orthopedics and our recent recognition by Healthgrades gives us the perfect opportunity to tell the world.

- Randy Weeks, Director of Surgery

High Quality Healthcare Where You'd Least Expect to Find It

2010-08-04T14:07:00.000-07:00

So, you've stumbled upon Citrus Memorial's freshly built blog. Congrats! We can be pretty easy to find on the web but folks occasionally have a hard time finding us here in rural Florida.

You might be surprised to know we're one of the best-kept secrets in healthcare. From our technogically advanced programs like ICE (induced hypothermia for cardiac arrest patients) to our nationally recognized stroke and orthopedic programs, we're at the top of our game.

It gets better, though. We were recently named Top 5% in the nation in both overall orthopedics and spine surgery by Healthgrades and we currently hold the title of #2 in the state of Florida in spine surgery.

I could keep going on all of our quality programs and initiatives, but I'll let the team tell you how we got here. Check back in every week to learn more about Citrus Memorial and how we're healing our community.

-Katie Myers, Public Relations