City with Largest Number of Adventist Hospitals Rates Best in National Evaluation of Hospital Care

by AT News Team

The Dayton (Ohio) metropolitan area tops the national ranking of hospitals with low death rates, according to a report from the health care ratings firm, Health Grades, Inc. With an overall inpatient mortality rate of 4.68 percent, Dayton rated better than any other metropolitan area in the United States in the company’s 2013 report, released Tuesday (February 19).
 
Dayton has a larger proportion of hospitals affiliated with the Seventh-day Adventist Church than any other metropolitan area in America. Eight of the 23 hospitals in the metro area or 35 percent are part of the Kettering Health Network (KHN) which is controlled by the denomination’s Columbia Union Conference. Orlando, Florida, is better known because it is the location of the headquarters of the largest Adventist health care organization, the Adventist Health System (AHS) with hospitals throughout the state and across the South and Midwest. But only seven of the 32 hospitals in the Orlando metropolitan area (22 percent) are part of AHS.
 
Unlike many of the awards and rating systems that hospitals announce regularly, this study was not voluntary. The rankings in this study were taken from public records of the 4,500 hospitals across the country in Medicare reports. “Hospitals cannot choose to participate or not participate,” Dr. Archelle Georgiou, a medical advisor to Health Grades, Inc., told the Dayton Daily News.
 
One of the Adventist hospitals in Dayton ranked among the top 50 hospitals in the country based on low rates of complications and death across 27 illnesses and procedures over the last seven years. Grandview Medical Center, the KHN facility in the inner city of Dayton, achieved this remarkable record. Richard Haas, president of Grandview, told the newspaper that this is the result of “years of dedication in applying evidence-based best practices.”
 
The Dayton metropolitan area has a population just under one million, while the Orlando metro area has a population of 2.1 million. “People in the Midwest generally have better health than people in the South,” a health planning official told Adventist Today. “Nonetheless, I think that Adventist concepts about health have made a real contribution in this area.”
 
Dayton has 11 Adventist churches and a church school that includes 12 grades plus a Kindergarten and preschool. KHN operates a college as well as hospitals and community clinics. Two of the churches also operate child care centers and Good Neighbor House, the community service agency of the Adventist churches in the area, is one of the major providers of health and social services for the poor.