Meadville Medical Center
751 Liberty Street
Meadville, PA 16335
814-333-5000
Meadville Medical Center is proud to have won the 2007 Premier Award for Quality for the fourth time in five years. This award focuses on excellence in the care of patients in the area of Hip and/or Knee Replacement Procedures. Awarded in six clinical areas, the Premier Award for Quality is based on quality and cost data regularly submitted to Premier for reporting and benchmarking purposes. The award is distinguished by its consideration of performance-based criteria, including clinical quality outcomes, clinical process indicators and resource utilization outcomes.
In addition, Meadville Medical Center accepted the Medicare/Medicaid "Top Performing Hospital," 2007. This award is presented by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services/Premier Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration Program, to participating hospitals for having superior quality of care in important clinical areas. MMC was recognized for its quality work in pneumonia care, and hip and knee replacement care.
A third national award MMC received was a Five-Star designation as a Community Value Index Top Hospital, 2007. Each year, Cleverly & Associates ranks US hospitals based on measures of financial performance and community benefit, and awards the top twenty percent of hospitals nationwide with the prestigious 5-Star Award. Over 4,700 hospitals nationwide were analyzed by Cleverly & Associates, and only 29 hospitals in Pennsylvania received the 5-Star Award. This is the third straight year that MMC has been recognized by Cleverly for outstanding community value.
The American College of Radiology's Commission on Quality and Safety, and the Commission on Breast Imaging recognized MMC as a "Breast Imaging Center of Excellence." This special designation is awarded only if a center has achieved accreditation by the ACR in stereotactic breast biopsy, breast ultrasound and ultrasound guided breast biopsy, and by the ACR or an FDA-approved state accrediting body in mammography.
Many different departments were recognized for the care given to rehab patients at MMC. Meadville Medical Center was recently awarded the Uniform Data System for Medical Rehabilitation (UDSMR) 2007 Top Performer Award in recognition of outstanding rehabilitation program performance. This top performer status is based on ranking in the top decile (a rating system which uses a one to ten scale) of UDSMR's program evaluation model for 800-plus facilities.
As a not-for-profit hospital, Meadville Medical Center continues to reinvest funds in vital facilities and programs to serve the community, such as clean, modern and safe places where patients receive care; and in the growth and expansion of specialty services close to home that are attractive, efficient and easily accessible. This will be most evident in the new Oncology Wellness Institute of Meadville Medical Center which will be opening this spring. This new center will be a free standing 19,000-square-foot facility bringing all outpatient cancer treatment services together in one place. A team of outstanding physicians and highly skilled staff members who actually live in the community will offer patients the best possible care. They have treated patients for years through the Comprehensive Cancer Care program and will continue to do at the Oncology Wellness Center.
The new TrilogyTM radiation system is the centerpiece of the Oncology Wellness Institute's treatment capability. The Trilogy™ radiation system is the most powerful, precise, and versatile treatment solution ever provided by one product. The versatile TrilogyTM system can be used to deliver the widest range of external beam radiotherapy. Advanced imaging capabilities built into the system allow therapists to position patients for treatment with sub-millimeter accuracy, making sure the tumor is lined up precisely with the treatment beam before the beam is turned on. A respiratory gating system takes into account the tumor movement that can occur as a patient breathes, turning the beam off and on, so that treatment is delivered only when the tumor is stationary.
The cancer center will also include a CT scanner and PET scanner to facilitate diagnosis and effective monitoring of treatment. Chemotherapy patients will have the option of receiving some of their treatments in privacy, or in a group setting so they can share their thoughts and experiences with others. The Oncology Wellness Institute will offer a way of caring for patients that centers on convenience and compassion in a comfortable and pleasant environment.
Other renovations took place throughout the year at Meadville Medical Center, as well. The Liberty Surgical Care Unit opened this year at the Liberty Street facility with 15 beds and a registration area on site. Within the LSCU, patients are quickly registered and made ready for surgery (which is next door) right in the same place. Afterwards they may be taken to the Post Anesthesia Care Unit for recovery and then transferred back to the new unit until it is determined they can be discharged. If they must be admitted overnight for observation, only then would they be taken up to a surgical floor as a regular inpatient.
A fifth operating room was opened at Liberty Street and urology services were moved to the Grove Street facility where a new cystoscopy table for urological procedures was installed. Soon, renovations will begin to the ambulatory surgery services at the Grove Street facility to make same-day surgeries more convenient for patients and their families. Plans are being made to expand and improve the Liberty Street phlebotomy area to offer more patient privacy. The number of phlebotomies being performed there has increased by 36.4% since the room was originally constructed.
New on-line pre-surgical testing assessments and telephone data collection have begun as part of the surgical initiatives being implemented. The Pyxis Connect system was implemented this year which digitizes physicians' medication orders and magnifies them, reducing legibility problems and making organization and retrieval of processed orders much easier. Real time 24/7 pharmacy order verification is now taking place which means that all medication orders are reviewed by a pharmacist before being dispensed, no matter what time of the day or night. MMC recently purchased and installed a Philips 40-slice CT scanner which made possible computerized tomography angiography to be performed by the surgeons. Two new ultrasounds were also purchased for the Radiology Department.
Services in outlying areas of the county have also been expanded. The Conneaut Lake Health Center was recently certified as a rural health clinic and offers services for people who are uninsured or underinsured. Construction of a new addition has been completed at the Conneaut Valley Health Center. Two new branches of the Conneaut Valley Health Center were opened in Cambridge Springs and in Meadville on Terrace Street. These two branches are applying for rural health clinic certification as well. All these locations will allow MMC to increase its ability to better serve the large number of medical assistance patients in Crawford County. During the last year, MMC provided transportation to and from these locations to two-thousand patients, traveling almost two-million miles.
MMC continues its collaborative efforts with Butler County Community College and Clarion University to provide on-site education opportunities for staff members and community members to train to become registered nurses. In a country suffering a shortage of nurses, Meadville Medical Center is "growing its own" nurses to be ready for the continued growth of its patient services.
The Visiting Nurse Association and the Hospice Program have now implemented palliative care services for those patients needing hospice-type care but who, for one reason or another, are ineligible for hospice services. The Wound Recovery and Hyperbaric Department remains the only full service wound care department in Northwest Pennsylvania.
On November 15th, 2007, Meadville Medical Center became a tobacco-free campus. All smoking areas have been removed from its properties. MMC will be helping the community by confronting the nation's leading cause of preventable death – smoking. Smoking is a major risk factor for cancer, heart and lung disease, causing many premature deaths in the United States every year. A tobacco-free campus is just one more way MMC is setting the standard for health and wellness in our community.