St. Joe celebrates being No. 1
The fledging open-heart surgery program at Provena St. Joseph Hospital in Elgin has spread its wings and is flying high.
HealthGrades, a Colorado-based group that evaluates the nation's hospitals, concluded that St. Joseph has the top program out of 62 Illinois hospitals for cardiac surgery and is in the top 5 percent of the United States for cardiac surgery and services.
About 250 staffers celebrated the news Wednesday morning in the cafeteria of their new facility.
Bill Brown, the hospital's president and CEO, announced the rankings as red and white balloons fell and staffers rattled noisemakers and later munched on cake.
"We've got the latest technology, but it's the people that deliver the care. That's how we achieved this accomplishment," Brown said afterward about the program, which started in 2004. "This is a great day for Provena St. Joseph Hospital, a great day for the communities that we serve, the people in Elgin and surrounding communities."
Christopher Boyer, a consultant at HealthGrades, said the company used Medicare patient data from the 2005, 2006 and 2007 in its rankings and assigned different weightings to patients depending on their risk factors.
Two other factors considered were the number of operations and survival rate for patients afterward.
"That speaks a lot to how the surgery went and post patient care," Boyer said. "It's a significant accomplishment for them. They're working hard to be at the top."
Josh McColough is spokesman for Sherman Hospital in Elgin, which was ranked 18th in the state for its heart program.
He noted that HealthGrades measured 255 surgeries performed by Sherman over a three-year span compared to 78 done by St. Joseph.
"The criteria (HealthGrades) uses might not be the best criteria for the health care consumer to base decisions on," he said, adding Sherman's program started in 1972.
Riverside Medical Center in Kankakee was No. 1 in Illinois for 2008.