When it comes to the business of health care there are good and bad lists. Among the good lists for hospitals is the U.S. News & World Report Best Hospitals survey that recently named McLaren Macomb among the best hospitals in Michigan.
‘This is a very significant achievement for McLaren Macomb and I think it really speaks to all of the hard work and dedication of our physicians, nurses and other support staff,’ said Dr. David Pinelli, vice president of medical affairs and chief medical officer at McLaren Macomb, which is a 288-bed acute care hospital in Mount Clemens.
The annual rankings were first published by U.S. News & World Report as ‘America’s Best Hospitals.’ Now in its 25th year and known simply as ‘Best Hospitals’ it seeks to identify medical centers that have performed the best when it comes to difficult patients, whose illnesses pose unusual challenges because of underlying conditions and procedure difficulty or other medical issues that add risk. The U.S. News report evaluates hospitals in 16 adult specialties and ranked McLaren Macomb as high performing in specialties of pulmonology, urology, neurology and neurosurgery.
‘U.S. News strives to provide patients and their families with the most comprehensive data available on hospitals,’ said Avery Comarow, U.S. News health rankings editor. ‘With an estimated 400,000 deaths occurring in hospitals each year from medical errors, measuring safety performance is critical to understanding how well a hospital cares for its patients.’
Pinelli cited a number of factors contributing to McLaren Macomb’s success.
For one, staff have implemented the bar code administration system to eliminate errors related to prescribed medicine and dosages. How it works is this: the nurse scans the bar code on the medication and the patient’s wristband and if either of those don’t match or something is amiss, an alert pops up telling the person administering the drug that something is wrong.
Then there’s the recent hiring of Dr. Luis Pires, a board-certified cardiac electrophysiologist for McLaren’s new heart rhythm treatment center. The center treats people with atrial fibrillation (A-fib), a dangerous heart rhythm condition that causes the heart to pump blood ineffectively.
Also a source of pride for McLaren Macomb is its verified trauma center being the only — if not few — hospitals in the area to offer 3D digital mammography and it’s affiliated with the Karmanos Cancer Institute.
‘That affiliation brings with it – all of the expertise and research (associated with Karmanos) to our patients,’ Pinelli said.
McLaren Macomb is among the top hospitals in Michigan. Though proud of their recent achievements Pinelli said he would like to see McLaren Macomb named the number one hospital in Michigan by the U.S. News & World Report.
For more details the U.S. News and World Report can be viewed at health.usnews.com/best-hospitals and will appear in print in the U.S. News Best Hospitals 2015 guidebook.
For more information on McLaren Macomb, visit mclaren.org/Macomb
