Hilton Head Hospital has received the 2009 clinical excellence award for gastrointestinal surgery from HealthGrades, a healthcare ratings company.  This award places Hilton Head Hospital’s clinical outcomes in the top five percent nationally for gastrointestinal surgery.

Additional 2009 HealthGrades clinical achievements include:

• Only Hospital in Charleston Area* to receive the 2009 HealthGrades Gastrointestinal Surgery Excellence Award™
• Ranked Among the Top 5 (#20 in SC for GI Services
• Ranked Among the Top 5 (#2) in SC  for GI Surgery
• Ranked Among the Top 10 (#7) in SC  for GI Medical Treatment
• Best in Charleston Area* for Overall GI Services
• Best in Charleston Area* for GI Surgery
• Five-Star Rated for GI Surgery
• Five-Star Rated for GI Procedures and Surgeries 
• Five-Star Rated for Treatment of GI Bleed 
• Ranked Among the Top 10 (#8) in SC for Cardiac Surgery
• Ranked Among the Top 5 (#4) in SC for Coronary Interventional Procedures
• Five-Star Rated for Treatment of Heart Attack 

*Areas as defined on www.healthgrades.com

“Hilton Head Hospital is dedicated to making the gastrointestinal and cardiac services in our hospital among the best in the country,” said Elizabeth Lamkin, the hospital’s chief executive officer. “Being the only hospital in the Charleston Area* to receive the 2009 HealthGrades Gastrointestinal Surgery Excellence Award™ and being ranked in the top five percent nationally for gastrointestinal surgery is outstanding.  My congratulations to all of the physicians, nurses and other staff who have made it possible to achieve these high marks. And, I can assure you we are pursuing the same standard of excellence in all the other areas of care which we provide.”

These findings were included in the eleventh annual HealthGrades Hospital Quality in America Study, which is the most comprehensive study of its kind, analyzing more than 41 million Medicare hospitalization records from 2005 to 2007 at the nation’s approximately 5,000 non-federal hospitals.  According to the study, if all hospitals performed at the level of five-star rated hospitals, 237,420 Medicare deaths could potentially have been prevented over the three years studied. More than half of those preventable deaths were associated with four conditions: sepsis, pneumonia, heart failure and respiratory failure.

While overall death rates declined from 2005 to 2007, the nation’s best-performing hospitals were able to reduce preventable deaths at a much faster rate than poor-performing hospitals, resulting in large state, regional and hospital-to-hospital variations in the quality of patient care, the study found.