Top Georgia Hospitals 2012

Georgia Trend’s 2012 list of Georgia’s Top Hospitals.

Georgia Trend’s 2012 Top Georgia Hospitals listings include 72 different facilities throughout the state, divided into five separate categories: Eight Teaching Hospitals, Eight Large Hospitals (more than 400 beds); 20 Medium-sized Hospitals (151-399 beds); 20 Small Hospitals (fewer than 150 beds), and 16 Critical Access Hospitals (rural community hospitals).

To determine the rankings, we chose to group hospitals of similar size and mission together and compare them with their peer institutions.

All information used to compile the rankings relies on publicly available information on quality of care, patient satisfaction, mortality and readmission statistics and data on hospital-acquired infections and conditions. The information comes from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).

It is available at www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov.

Data download date for our analysis is September 2012.

Information for determining bed number/hospital size is from the American Hospital Directory website at www.ahd.com.

To come up with the rankings, Georgia Trend worked with researchers and healthcare professionals at WellStar Health System in Marietta, under the direction of Marcia L. Delk, M.D., MBA, senior  VP safety and chief quality officer. Kerri Franklin, executive director of quality informatics and improvement, was the chief researcher.

The WellStar team accessed the databases and compiled the data mathematically; decisions on how to present the data were made by Georgia Trend.