Kaiser Permanente Redwood City hospital wins national honor for care

Kaiser Permanente’s Redwood City Med Center Earns ‘Top Performer on Key Quality Measures™’

Recognition from the Joint Commission

 Kaiser Permanente’s Redwood City Medical Center today was named one of the nation’s Top Performers on Key Quality Measures by The Joint Commission, the leading accreditor of health care organizations in America. KP Redwood City was recognized by The Joint Commission for exemplary performance in using evidence-based clinical processes that are shown to improve care for certain conditions, including heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia, surgical care, children’s asthma, and stroke.

            "Every day, the staff at our Kaiser Permanente Redwood City Medical Center work hard to provide our patients and members with safe, high-quality, affordable world-class health care,” says Frank Beirne, Senior Vice President and San Mateo Area Manager. “This Joint Commission Top Performer award acknowledges their diligence.".

            Twenty-two Kaiser Permanente Hospitals in California and Hawai’i were honored as “Top Performers”.  They are among             620 hospitals in the U.S. earning the distinction on Key Quality for attaining and sustaining excellence in accountability measure performance.

            "The Kaiser Permanente physicians and staff at our Redwood City Medical Center are dedicated to providing 21st century health care that is integrated, coordinated, and technologically advanced across all disciplines: they are definitely top performers every day," said Dr. Jim O’Donnell, Physician-in-Chief at the Redwood City Hospital. 

The Joint Commission keeps track of how hospitals perform their care. There are 22 performance measures, and Top Performers had to rate 95% performance. That means a hospital had to perform a specific health care practice 95 times out of a 100 opportunities to do it.  Each accountability measure represents an evidence-based practice – for example, giving aspirin at arrival for heart attack patients, giving antibiotics one hour before surgery, and providing a home management plan for children with asthma.

“When we raise the bar and provide the proper guidance and tools, hospitals have responded with excellent results,” says Mark R. Chassin, M.D., FACP, M.P.P., M.P.H., president, The Joint Commission. “This capacity for continual improvement points toward a future in which quality and safety defects are dramatically reduced and high reliability is sought and achieved with regularity.”

The Top Performer on Key Quality Measures comes as Kaiser Permanente Redwood City is building a brand new, state of the art hospital in Redwood City, which is scheduled to open in late 2014. A progress report on the construction can be seen on several local Patch websites,

Including Redwood City: http://redwoodcity.patch.com/articles/kaiser-s-replacement-hospital-on-track-for-2014-opening