Some of the best care in the country is being delivered by NYU Langone in Mineola and Catholic Health’s St. Francis Hospital and Heart Center in Roslyn, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
“This recognition reflects the dedication of our entire staff and the high standards we strive to meet for every patient we serve,” said Dr. Joseph Greco, executive vice president and chief of hospital operations at NYU Langone Hospital—Long Island. “It really is a very nice accomplishment.”
NYU-Langone Long Island received a 5-star rating from CMS for the fifth year in a row. This distinction places the Mineola hospital among the top 10% of facilities in the nation for quality, safety, and patient experience. Catholic Health St. Francis has received the five-star rating for the past six years.
“We were the first hospital on Long Island to achieve this honor,” Catholic Health St. Francis wrote in a Facebook post. “This accomplishment speaks to the unparalleled level of patient care that we offer to the people of Long Island.”
Greco said the rating is based on performance data across 45 domain areas and five main categories, including patient outcomes, safety of care, or how likely people are to get infections or suffer other complications while at the hospital, readmission rates, and patient satisfaction.
“The most important is mortality. That’s the expectation that when you come into the hospital, you will actually leave,” Greco said. “Our mortality rate is certainly one of the lowest in New York state, if not the country.”
Greco added that Mineola also has one of the lowest infection rates and works hard to ensure that patients receive exactly what they need so they don’t need to return.
“Not only are we caring for you and getting you out in a timely manner, we’re making sure that that care is actually appropriate, because our readmission scores are also some of the lowest in the area,” Greco said. “We also have some of the lowest lengths of stay in the hospital.”
“This is a good proxy for quality of care,” Greco said of the CMS rating. “No outside metric agency is perfect, but certainly when you have five stars, and continue to have for a number of years, it’s telling you that you’re doing everything right. We take that and we look at other external benchmarks as well as our own internal benchmarks to continue advancing care.”
Greco attributed NYU Langone’s high marks to its commitment to high-quality care across the board and its use of a data-based dashboard to continuously adapt their practices to meet patient needs.
“Everybody in this organization is following one initiative: to provide the best quality care,” Greco said. “We do that by having a robust way of measuring outcomes…We have real-time data that we’re able to see and adjust to and actually make improvements.”
He said the dashboard provides information on patients’ care within NYU Langone and also at other local providers, ensuring all involved in the person’s care are able to use all available information to make the best health care decisions.
Three other Long Island hospitals, including Northwell’s Glen Cove Hospital, Mather Hospital and Huntington Hospital, also received five-star ratings from CMS this year.
NYU Langone also won five-star ratings for their Manhattan and Brooklyn practices.
