LifePoint Launches Quality Designation Program in Collaboration with Duke

Clark Regional Medical Center Named Inaugural Duke LifePoint Quality Affiliate

BRENTWOOD, Tenn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- LifePoint Health (NASDAQ: LPNT) and Duke University Health System have advanced their quality collaboration through the launch of the Duke LifePoint Quality Affiliate designation program. This designation recognizes hospitals operated by subsidiaries of LifePoint that have enrolled in the LifePoint National Quality Program and succeeded in transforming their culture of safety and achieving high standards of quality care, performance improvement and patient engagement. Clark Regional Medical Center in Winchester, Ky., was named the first hospital to receive Duke LifePoint Quality Affiliate designation today.

“LifePoint’s operations are defined by our mission of making communities healthier,” said William F. Carpenter III, chairman and chief executive officer of LifePoint Health. “A dedication to quality care is at the heart of everything we do. Through initiatives like the LifePoint National Quality Program, we are creating a culture in which everyone – from caregivers to environmental staff to patients – has a voice and plays a vital role in quality. Clark Regional Medical Center is an ideal example of a hospital that has embraced this culture, and we are delighted that it has been named the first Duke LifePoint Quality Affiliate.”

The LifePoint National Quality Program was created through a quality collaboration bringing together experts from LifePoint and Duke to enhance patient safety and improve quality care. This collaboration is built upon a decade-long relationship between LifePoint and Duke that has expanded and evolved throughout the years, leading to the creation of the Duke LifePoint Healthcare joint venture and Duke’s involvement in LifePoint’s Hospital Engagement Network (HEN) contract with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) from December 2011 to December 2014.

With the Duke LifePoint quality collaboration, LifePoint and Duke have expanded upon what they accomplished together with the HEN and other initiatives, bringing additional resources to their efforts to advance quality across all LifePoint hospitals and identify best practices that will be offered to help create safe and highly reliable care nationwide.

“Duke and LifePoint have long shared a commitment to quality care and patient safety,” said William J. Fulkerson, Jr., MD, executive vice president of Duke University Health System. “Together, we created the LifePoint National Quality Program to serve as a differentiator for recognizing the commitment of hospitals that work to achieve consistently high standards of quality care and patient safety. We commend the Clark Regional team for its outstanding efforts in becoming the first hospital to achieve Duke LifePoint Quality Affiliate status.”

When hospitals enroll in the LifePoint National Quality Program, they begin working with Duke and LifePoint quality coaches to evaluate and strengthen their quality programs and processes. Following an initial evaluation, a hospital creates a plan and begins to implement changes that will help it achieve quality improvement benchmarks and establish long-term solutions to sustain its results.

“The multitude of quality ratings, scales and lists that exist within our industry today is both overwhelming and confusing,” said Rusty Holman, MD, chief medical officer of LifePoint Health. “We created the LifePoint National Quality Program to establish a framework that is broader than any of these. Our program goes beyond achieving scores or benchmarks to emphasize additional measures that we feel are equally important. This program emphasizes how a hospital demonstrates leadership, fosters an organizational culture, and uses proven methods of improvement to achieve great results. It also strives to ensure that hospitals have programs and processes in place that allow them to engage their patients, physicians and employees in quality care and constantly evaluate and improve what they do.”

In addition to evaluating common quality care and patient safety metrics, the LifePoint National Quality Program focuses on critically important principles, such as leadership that supports quality, consistent attention to performance improvement, the creation and support of a hospital-wide culture of safety, and engagement of patients and their families in care provided. Duke LifePoint Quality Affiliate designation recognizes those hospitals that achieve a broad range of criteria in each of these areas and demonstrate a capacity to continuously measure and improve what they do.

Criteria of the LifePoint National Quality Program emphasize measures such as:

• The amount and substance of training received by leaders in patient safety and clinical quality;
• Whether the hospital has achieved Patient Safety Professional certification through the National Patient Safety Foundation;
• Inter-departmental and interdisciplinary teamwork and accountability in quality and safety programs;
• Use of data-driven quality and safety improvement and data transparency;
• Use of defined improvement methodology; and
• Patient participation in hospital committees, improvement teams and governing- or advisory-level committees.

Clark Regional Medical Center, a 79-bed hospital that has served people in Winchester for nearly a century, was the first hospital to enroll in the LifePoint National Quality Program in early 2014. Over the past year, the Clark team has implemented a number of best practices in patient safety, leading to significant improvement in safety culture. For example, recognizing the need for effective communication and interdisciplinary teamwork, the hospital adopted Safety Boards, a simple strategy to allow anyone – including patients and family members – to raise concerns about safety. Progress toward resolution is publicly displayed in the hospital with results reported to the organization’s interdisciplinary patient safety and clinical quality committee.

“The Clark Regional team is honored to be named the first Duke LifePoint Quality Affiliate,” said Cherie Sibley, CEO of Clark Regional Medical Center. “Our hospital has always been committed to providing the highest quality care, but being part of the LifePoint National Quality Program helped us think about quality in a different way. Today, quality is an ingrained part of our culture, and we are driven to continually strive to improve how we can flawlessly and compassionately care for and support our patients and their families.”

About LifePoint Health

LifePoint Health (NASDAQ: LPNT) is a leading healthcare company dedicated to Making Communities Healthier®. Through its subsidiaries, it provides quality inpatient, outpatient and post-acute services close to home. LifePoint owns and operates community hospitals, regional health systems, physician practices, outpatient centers, and post-acute facilities in 20 states. It is the sole community healthcare provider in the majority of the non-urban communities it serves. More information about the company can be found at www.LifePointHealth.net. All references to "LifePoint," "LifePoint Health" or the "Company" used in this release refer to affiliates or subsidiaries of LifePoint Health, Inc.

About Clark Regional Medical Center

Clark Regional Medical Center is a 79-bed, community hospital which has served the residents of east central Kentucky since 1917. The Medical Center has more than 100 affiliated physicians, over 400 employees, and 100 volunteers on its staff. The hospital was acquired by LifePoint Hospitals in May 2010 and completed its relocation to a new, $60 million, state of the art medical campus in March 2012.

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LifePoint Health
Diane Huggins, 615-920-7651
Cell: 615-476-2667
[email protected]

Source: LifePoint Health

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