News Room - Media Coverage

Below are samples of media coverage about Caritas Carney Hospital...

Six Mass. hospitals aplauded for quality, cost efficiency

-By Jeffrey Krasner Globe Staff / November 26, 2007

Six Massachusetts hospitals have received the 2007 Select Practice National Quality awards from Premier CareScience, a nationwide association of not-for profit hospitals. The hospitals include Caritas Carney Hospital in Dorchester and Caritas St. Elizabeth's Medial Center, two financially strapped members of the hospital chain owned by the Archdiocese of Boston. Carney, in particular, faces challenges because it loses millions of dollars each year despite a state subsidy and contributions from its sister hospitals within Caritas. Other Massachusetts hospitals honored by Premier are Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Lahey Clinic in Burlington, Faulkner Hospital in Jamaica Plain, and Winchester Hospital.

Dolores Mitchell, executive director of the Group Insurance Commission, which provides healthcare insurance to state employees and retirees, said, "it's good to see community hospitals being recognized. They get overshadowed by large academic medical centers and they are under-appreciated. It's particularly important since by and large their costs are lower." Mitchell, who is also a director of the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector Authority, which is overseeing implementation of the state's health reform law, added, "Given the fact that Massachusetts medical costs are among the highest in the nation, we have to be concerned about what hospitals cost. The rise in the cost of medical care has become unsustainable."

Premier Carescience is a voluntary association of nonprofit hospitals nationwide. The annual study ranks nonprofit hospitals by quality, which measures deaths, illnesses and complications for each facility, and efficiency, measured by patients' length of stay. Of about 4,500 hospitals that belong to Premier, the top 1 percent receive the award. This year, more hospitals in Massachusetts received the Premier award than in any other state. Maria Gray, vice president for quality and safety at the Caritas Christi hospital chain, said Carney and St. Elizabeth's have made significant quality improvements working with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, a Cambridge nonprofit that works to improve patient care worldwide. For instance, she said, between 2 percent and 3 percent of patients at St. Elizabeth's Medical Center who were fitted with central venous catheters - convenient, semi-permanent gateways for delivering drugs and other materials directly to their bloodstreams - used to develop infections. The healthcare institute provided instructions for standardizing the procedure for inserting a catheters, and the hospital began observing nurses who installed them to ensure compliance. Now, she said, there hasn't been a case of infection from the catheters in several months.

This year, Gray said, St. Elizabeth's is among hospitals working with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement to identify ways to reduce the possibility of complications including infections, heart attacks, and blood clots in patients who have just had surgery. Dr. Gregory McSweeney, vice president of medical affairs at Carney Hospital, said he has worked to eliminate the number of patients who are using breathing tubes who contract pneumonia, a common hospital-borne infection. Important steps such as ensuring that every patient with a breathing tube has the head of their bed elevated "are easy to overlook in a busy hospital setting," he said. Steven J. Spear, a senior fellow at the healthcare institute, said improving quality and efficiency are ways to extend healthcare. "We deny care to too many people, the people who get care pay too much, and the quality of care is less than it should be," said Spear. "These hospitals are demonstrating the possibility that we should expect better care for more people at lower cost. It's very encouraging."