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SOURCE: UHC (NOW Vizient, Inc.)

CHICAGO, Oct. 23, 2014 -- UHC announced today the top-performing academic medical centers that have won the 2014 UHC Quality Leadership Award. The award is given to UHC member academic medical centers that have demonstrated superior performance in delivering high-quality, safe, efficient, patient-centered, and equitable care.

The 2014 winners are:

1. NYU Langone Medical Center
2. Mayo Clinic Hospital – Rochester
3. The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center
4. Beaumont Hospital, Royal Oak
5. Rush University Medical Center
6. University of Utah ÐÇ¿Õ´«Ã½ Care
7. The University of Kansas Hospital
8. Emory University Hospital
9. University of Missouri ÐÇ¿Õ´«Ã½ Care
10. Cleveland Clinic
11. Houston Methodist Hospital
12. Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center

"UHC commends these academic medical centers for their strong commitment to providing high-quality patient care throughout their clinical enterprises," said Irene M. Thompson, UHC's president and chief executive officer. "As evidenced by their performance on the measures in the Quality and Accountability Study, these organizations exhibit the fundamental characteristics-shared sense of purpose, successful leadership style, accountability mechanisms, focus on results, and collaboration-of top-performing academic medical centers."

The award winners were announced at the UHC Annual Conference 2014 in Las Vegas, which was attended by nearly 2,000 people, including health care professionals from more than 100 UHC member organizations.

The UHC Quality Leadership Award uses a unique and in-depth methodology and ranking system based on data analysis from the annual Quality and Accountability Study, which was designed to help academic medical centers identify structures and processes associated with high performance in quality and safety across a broad spectrum of patient care activity. The Institute of Medicine's six domains of care-mortality, effectiveness, safety, equity, patient centeredness, and efficiency-were used as a guide in structuring the study. The composite scoring system uses a comprehensive approach to analyzing patient-level data from the UHC Clinical Data Base/Resource Managerâ„¢ as well as data from the UHC Core Measures Data Base and the publicly reported Hospital Consumer Assessment of ÐÇ¿Õ´«Ã½care Providers and Systems.

This year the award methodology was refined with enhanced measures related to safety, including data on hospital-acquired infections from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National ÐÇ¿Õ´«Ã½care Safety Network and new metrics on venous thromboembolism based on The Joint Commission's National Quality Core Measures.

About University of Utah ÐÇ¿Õ´«Ã½ Care

University of Utah ÐÇ¿Õ´«Ã½ Care is the only academic health care system in the Intermountain West. The system provides care for Utahns and residents of five surrounding states in a referral area encompassing more than 10 percent of the continental United States. The system receives more than one million outpatient visits and nearly 30,000 inpatient admissions annually. Visit University of Utah ÐÇ¿Õ´«Ã½ for more information.

About UHC

UHC is an alliance of the nation's leading nonprofit academic medical centers, which are focused on delivering world-class patient care. Formed in 1984 and based in Chicago, UHC fosters collaboration with and among its 117 academic medical center and 310 affiliated hospital members through its renowned programs and services in the areas of comparative data and analytics, performance improvement, supply chain management, strategic research, and public policy. UHC helps its members achieve excellence in quality, safety, and cost-effectiveness.