UC San Diego Health has been honored as a top performer for Vizient’s 2024 Bernard A. Birnbaum, MD, Quality Leadership Performance Award, marking the sixth consecutive year the health system has achieved this prominent distinction. This award places UC San Diego Health among the top academic medical centers in the nation, highlighting its exceptional commitment to delivering high-quality, patient-centered care. This sustained excellence recognizes the region’s only academic medical center’s mission of advancing health care standards and outcomes at the highest level.
“Being named a Vizient top performer for the sixth year in a row underscores our unwavering commitment to excellence in patient care,” said Patty Maysent, CEO of UC San Diego Health. “This recognition is a testament to the dedication and expertise of our entire team, who work tirelessly to ensure our patients receive the safest and highest quality care possible.”
This year, Vizient evaluated 860 hospitals, categorizing them into four cohorts for the Vizient Quality and Accountability Ranking. The evaluation assessed performance across six key domains: safety, mortality, effectiveness, efficiency, patient-centeredness, and equity of care.
UC San Diego Health is ranked ninth out of 115 health systems in the “Comprehensive Academic Medical Centers” cohort.
"This award demonstrates our commitment to setting exemplary standards in the health care industry through a performance-driven culture and innovation in both technology and process to drive the highest quality of patient care," said Christopher Longhurst, MD, chief medical officer and chief digital officer at UC San Diego Health.
The ranking incorporates data from the Vizient Clinical Database, the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems Survey, and the National Healthcare Safety Network, which collaborates with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Since 2005, the Vizient Quality and Accountability Study has annually assessed hospitals and health systems, helping to benchmark their performance to peers and pinpoint effective practices for enhancing quality and safety across various aspects of patient care.
Six years ago, UC San Diego Health also began participating in the Vizient Ambulatory Quality and Accountability ranking, which measures the quality of outpatient care in five domains: access to care, continuum of care, quality, efficiency, and equity. This year, the UC San Diego Health ambulatory network achieved its highest rank, 12th among the top 63 ambulatory care practices in the nation.
“Patients expect the same attention to safety, quality, and patient experience at every point of interaction with UC San Diego Health,” said Christopher Kane, MD, CEO of the UC San Diego Health Physician Group. “We embraced the Vizient ambulatory quality goals and metrics to further consistency across the patient environment of care, from primary care to specialty clinics and from procedure suites to hospitalization. Our quality infrastructure follows patients throughout their health journey.”
The recognition period is for work spanning from July 1, 2023 through June 30, 2024.
“Our health system has come together with a unified mission to excel in every dimension of our quality framework on our journey to high reliability,” said Chad VanDenBerg, MPH, chief quality and patient safety officer at UC San Diego Health. “I extend my deepest appreciation to our entire team for their commitment to put our patients at the center of all we do, which has turned our vision into meaningful accomplishments and is a testament to our strong teamwork and alignment in advancing quality and safety.”
UC San Diego Health, the region’s only academic health system, is dedicated to delivering outstanding patient care through commitment to community, groundbreaking research and inspired teaching. For 2024-25, U.S. News & World Report ranked UC San Diego Health as the best hospital system in San Diego and among the nation’s best in 11 adult medical and surgical specialties, including cancer, cardiology, geriatrics, neurology, orthopedics and pulmonology. It is the first health system in San Diego County to make the Honor Roll for outstanding patient care. The 1,011-bed health system includes three hospitals — Hillcrest Medical Center, Jacobs Medical Center and East Campus Medical Center — as well as Sulpizio Cardiovascular Center, Moores Cancer Center, Shiley Eye Institute, Koman Family Outpatient Pavilion and Altman Clinical and Translational Research Institute. The health system also includes primary care and same-day services at clinics throughout Southern California.
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