Media contact: Bob Shepard
UAB Medicine
The scorecard compared UAB Medicine to other academic medical centers nationwide.
(Photography: Steve Wood) was recognized by Vizient Inc. for making significant improvements in its year-over-year rankings and scoring in the top quartile on the Vizient Quality and Accountability Scorecard.
UAB Medicine ranks No. 11 among 101 participating comprehensive academic medical centers included in the 2021 Vizient Quality and Accountability Scorecard. Academic medical centers, or AMCs, receiving this recognition rose at least 20 positions from the prior year in the annual Vizient Quality and Accountability Ranking and scored in the top 25.
“There is no substitute for quality, especially in health care,” said UAB Health System CEO Will Ferniany, Ph.D. “UAB Medicine’s goal with our AMC21 strategic plan is to be in the top 10 in Vizient quality. With the efforts of our faculty and staff and with our quality leaders, we are about to reach our goal. Reaching No. 11 is a milestone that we can all take pride in achieving.”
UAB Health System Chief Quality Officer Loring Rue, M.D., agrees.
“Our significant improvement in the Vizient Quality and Accountability Scorecard ranking is a direct reflection of many efforts across the organization and by our department-aligned quality officers,” Rue said. “Achieving a rank of No. 11 among more than 100 other comprehensive academic medical centers — in spite of a pandemic — is an accomplishment that should be recognized.”
About the Vizient Scorecard
Vizient is the nation’s largest member-owned health care services company. It provides solutions to help providers improve patient outcomes and lower costs, and it collects data that helps track those improvements.
Since 2005, the Vizient scorecard has ranked quality and safety performance across varying patient populations. The rankings measure performance in five domains: safety, mortality, effectiveness, efficiency and patient-centeredness. Nearly all of the nation’s academic medical centers participate.
The rankings reflect measures from the Vizient Clinical Database and include performance in core measures data; the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare, Providers and Systems survey; and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Healthcare Safety Network for work spanning July 1, 2020, through June 30, 2021.
Benjamin B. Taylor, M.D., UAB Health System associate chief quality officer, says the improvement was due to consistent hard work.
“We saw a great improvement through focused efforts to better understand and account for specific patient populations,” Taylor said. “Overcoming this hurdle will help us focus our efforts on new areas of opportunity as we continue striving to enhance clinical performance, quality and safety.”
UAB Medicine uses the Quality and Accountability Scorecard to provide a global measure of many of its initiatives, highlight year-over-year performance to help target specific opportunities for improvement and compare itself to other similar hospitals.
To learn more about the quality and patient safety initiatives, visit uabmedicine.org/quality.