Hill Country Memorial was named one of the nation’s 100 Top Hospitals® by Truven Health Analytics for the third consecutive year, putting it in the company of the top 1 percent of hospitals nationally.

Of more than 2,800 hospitals surveyed, Hill Country Memorial was one of 20 small community hospitals nationwide and one of 11 Texas hospitals that made the list. For potential patients, this means that the same level of exceptional quality care found at some larger institutions can be found right here in the Hill Country.

“Hill Country Memorial will continue to put quality health care and safety at the forefront every single day,” said HCM Chief Executive Officer Jayne Pope. “With every rating, review and quality measure we strive to better this organization, and once again, our physicians and staff have proven their dedication to the health of this community.”

The Truven Health 100 Top Hospitals® study recognizes hospitals’ performance across measures of patient satisfaction, average length of stay, patient safety, operating margin, readmission rates and other areas. The study has been conducted annually since 1993, and this is the fourth time Hill Country Memorial has been named to the 100 Top Hospitals list.

The study shows that if all hospitals in the U.S. performed at the level of Hill Country Memorial:

• Nearly 165,000 additional lives could be saved
• Nearly 90,000 additional patients could be complication-free
• More than $5.4 billion could be saved
• The average patient stay would decrease by half a day

To conduct the 100 Top Hospitals study, Truven Health researchers evaluated more than 2,800 short-term, acute care, non-federal hospitals. They used public information—Medicare cost reports, Medicare Provider Analysis and Review data, and core measures and patient satisfaction data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Hospital Compare website. Hospitals do not apply, and winners do not pay to market this honor.

The winning hospitals were announced in the March 3 edition of Modern Healthcare magazine.

If the same standards were applied to all inpatients, the impact would be even greater. For more information on this study and other 100 Top Hospitals research, please visit www.100tophospitals.com.