TRENDS
Three Nueterra facilities are among 23 winners of the 2009 Apex Quality Award, which is given by CTQ. The award, which is only given to the highest performing health care facilities, recognizes providers for their excellence in patient satisfaction and loyalty attributes. The three Nueterra winners are:
- Manhattan Surgical Hospital Manhattan, Kan.
- Marysville Surgery Center Marysville, Ohio.
- Ridgewood Surgery and Endoscopy Center Wichita, Kan.
To receive the award, each facility must:
- Fall within the top 10 percent of its peers' overall score average
- Meet a minimum threshold response for surveys returned during the past year by facility type
- Measure a minimum number of key performance indicators selected by CTQ
Nueterra uses CTQ as its third-party collector of patient satisfaction data because the company is accepted as an unrelated third party for Medicare and other payers and is the clinical benchmarking arm of Physician Hospitals of America. Using the CTQ system, patient satisfaction data is formatted to facilitate easy analysis of the data and provide immediate warnings of problems to managers.
Patient satisfaction surveys are important because future reimbursement will be tied, in part, to the scores. Medicare is proposing a 2% reduction for those facilities that do not meet established benchmarks. Currently 25 Nueterra facilities actively survey patients using the CTQ system and the other Nueterra facilities use hand tabulation.
Sherri Filipczuk, marketing brand manager, Nueterra Healthcare