There are 4,784 hospitals in the United States that administer Medicare. As part of the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, known as CMS, rates all those hospitals on seven categories before giving each an overall rating from 1 to 5 stars based on the quality of care. Of those 4,784 hospitals, just 293 received 5-star ratings. In 2018, for the second year in a row, Verde Valley Medical Center was one of them.
“We are thrilled and so very proud of the amazing work, compassion and commitment displayed daily by our colleagues, which makes an honor such as this possible,” Northern Arizona Healthcare CEO and President Florence Spyrow wrote in a press release. In addition to VVMC, Flagstaff Medical Center, which is also administered by Northern Arizona Healthcare, also received 5 stars. “In the New Era at NAH, we are committed to living up to the trust our communities place in us every day, with every patient, at every location.”
“It’s really about teamwork between the physicians and the nursing staff in caring for patients that, I think, provides those outstanding outcomes,” Carole Peet, NAH Vice President and Chief Administrative Officer at VVMC, said. “None of them can do it alone. It’s really a team approach.”
The 5-star rating puts VVMC on par with famous hospitals like the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix or Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles. The evaluation was based on seven general categories, each with numerous factors within them: Mortality, safety of care, readmission, patient experience, effectiveness of care, timeliness of care and efficient use of medical imaging.
Of those categories, VVMC got marks above the national average on safety of care and readmission, something administrators say they try to deliberately focus on. The attribute their top-level readmission metrics — 8.9 percent, compared to a state average of 14 percent and a national average of 15.5, according to data provided by the Swedish health care accreditation firm DNV GL — to an approach that highlights not just care for patients at the hospital but continuing that care after they go home.
“This kind of 5-star award is not just for the people that work within the four walls of the hospital,” Dr. Leon Pontikes, VVMC’s Chief Medical Officer, said. “This reflects the quality of care provided by all the providers, primary care clinics, specialists that are out in the community, Camp Verde and across the street at Cottonwood family practice and everything, because they are the ones that take over the care after they step out the door and they contribute to those stellar results as well.”
There was only one category where VVMC received marks below the national average — patient experience. In numerous survey questions asked of VVMC patients, such as whether doctors communicated well, whether the facilities were always clean or whether they would recommend the hospital to another patient, the hospital scored below both the average nationally and in the state of Arizona. Patients may be getting good care at the hospital according to the data, but many do not seem to feel as if that is true.
“We’ve done a lot of training with our nursing staff and we just finished training with our physician staff because the number one area where we have an opportunity to improve around is communication — making sure that we are continually listening to our patients and their families and updating them,” Peet said. “The customer service side is the softer skills of health care. It’s the people skills. We don’t necessarily train our physicians or our nurses around that. When you get hired at Starbucks, you get all this training in how you present to the customer. We don’t typically do that in health care, so we’re much more focused on that, because it’s really turning into a customer service economy. We expect it and we get surveyed. So we need to figure that out in health care, how we can do that better and that is certainly our biggest opportunity in health care here at VVMC.”
“I think what we stress to our medical staff is you have to go even farther,” Pontikes said. “You have to work harder and better, especially in those customer service aspects to build the reputation that hopefully we deserve.”
As a small hospital in a rural area, VVMC has limited resources, which administrators see as a blessing in some ways, as well. The hospital will never handle some of the more challenging and specific procedures that some big hospitals do, like open heart surgery. Instead, the hospital tries to focus on handling primary care well for the population it serves.
“The most affordable and efficient way to provide care is to keep people healthy enough to not need to be admitted to the hospital,” Pontikes said. “If we can provide all the services to minimize the need for admissions for the patient, it’s the most efficient, the most affordable and the most compassionate way to provide care.”
