Credit Photo provided by Saratoga Hospital
Newsweek has named Saratoga Hospital one of “The World’s Best Hospitals” in its ranking of 2,000 facilities across more than 25 countries. The 171-bed hospital ranked 162nd in the U.S. with a score of 66.7 percent. Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts, UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester, Massachusetts and St. Francis Hospital & Medical Center in Hartford, Connecticut also made the cut.
WAMC's Jim Levulis spoke with Angelo Calbone, President and CEO of Saratoga Hospital, about the ranking and how the hospital industry has weathered the COVID-19 pandemic.
Calbone: Well, first of all, I’m incredibly proud of our organization and staff for doing the great work that they do every day that gets such a ranking in the first place. You know, as to what drove this, there's a number of components. To kind of give you the general high- level sense of that. It's public feedback, sourced from patient satisfaction surveys, from physician recommendation. And that's fairly heavily weighted. And to give you a little bit more of an insight into that physician recommendation, there's actually a survey process that they went through asking questions like, if you had a patient that couldn't go to the hospital that you typically work at, what would be your preferred institution? You know, very happy and proud to say, the Saratoga Hospital ranked very high in that around the region. Those components of feedback didn't just come from physicians, they were nurses and other healthcare professionals. And like I said, the other one was patient satisfaction, patient feedback, was another heavily weighted component. The third actually relates to objective metrics. Things that we track inside the institution that measure a lot of outcomes: mortality rates, safety measures, readmission rates, infection rates, as examples. So those are the three, you know, groupings of information that go into picking this. The comment I'd like to make, and this really gets back to why I think this is even more special in this moment, is that the heaviest weighted components relate to how our patients and community experienced us over this last year. Put that in context that we experienced a pandemic over that same period of time. Our staff was challenged, pushed, stressed. And I think the remarkable outcome here is that while we were experiencing that as an institution, our patients and community experienced their customary level of service, compassion, and attention from our staff so that that stress didn't translate through to the patient experience. And I think that's probably what I'm most proud about with this recognition.