Quality, Safety, and Value
At Lakeland Health, we focus every day on enhancing health and serving our community. As a part of this mission, we work continuously to improve our quality, our safety, and our value to our patients. We strive to align with best practices in the health care industry and leading-edge technologies so that you don’t have to travel out of the area when you are in need of treatment.
To determine if we’re accomplishing our goals, we benchmark, or track, how we rank in quality metrics when compared to our local, regional, and national health care system peers. Since all other hospitals are working on improving as well, we use analytics to understand where our goals should be – not just this year, but three to five years into the future.
One of the main indicators used to benchmark this success is the star-scoring system developed by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) which ranks hospitals from 1 to 5 stars based on all the publicly reported quality indicators. In 2021 the St. Joseph and Niles hospitals were awarded 4 out of 5 stars - a ranking given to only the top 20% of all hospitals in the nation.
We are proud to provide exemplary care to our friends and neighbors in southwest Michigan and to offer the resources necessary to treat 95% of all the patients who walk through our doors. And in those select cases when we need the assistance of highly specialized doctors, we engage with them – from universities to research hospitals – to get our patients the care we need.