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(Beaver, PA)-(August 25, 2008) - Heritage Valley Beaver was recently named one of the nation's performance improvement leaders by Thomson Reuters, a New York City-based information agency and one of the world’s largest providers of financial data and business news.

Heritage Valley Beaver, its board of directors and its executive team were recognized for being one of a hundred hospitals making the greatest progress in improving hospital-wide performance over five consecutive years (2002-2006). The 2007 Thomson Reuters 100 Top Hospitals®: Performance Improvement Leaders (PI Leaders) awardees set national benchmarks for the rate and consistency of improvement in clinical outcomes, patient safety, hospital efficiency, financial stability and growth. Findings from the fifth edition of the PI Leaders study appeared in the August 11, 2008, issue of Modern Healthcare magazine.

The PI Leaders study analyzed acute care hospitals nationwide using detailed empirical performance data from years 2002 through 2006, including publicly available Medicare MedPAR data Medicare cost reports, and Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) outpatient data. The study rated hospitals on eight factors — patient mortality, medical complications, patient safety, length of stay, expenses, profitability, cash-to-debt ratio, and use of evidence-based medicine. Overall, researchers evaluated 2,867 short-term, acute care, non-federal hospitals grouped into five categories: major teaching hospitals, other teaching hospitals, large community hospitals, medium-sized community hospitals, and small community hospitals.

Of the 25 winning hospitals in the “Teaching Hospitals” category, Heritage Valley Beaver was the only southwestern Pennsylvania winner. Teaching Hospitals were defined as those with 200 or more acute care beds in service and either an intern and resident-per-bed ratio of at least 0.03 or involvement in at least three Graduate Medical Education programs overall. The other Pennsylvania hospitals listed in this category were PinnacleHealth in Harrisburg and Robert Packer Hospital in Sayre, PA.

“Leaders selected for this award chose to begin the long journey needed to build an organization aligned for hospital-wide improvement and to effect permanent change,” said Jean Chenoweth, senior vice president for performance improvement and 100 Top Hospitals programs at Thomson Reuters. “In every case, these leaders accepted the challenge to initiate change, building a culture receptive to improvement, and generated permanent improvement as measured by objective statistical analyses of publicly available data. These are leaders who have brought increasing value to the community year after year.”

Rosemary Nolan, Chief Operating Officer of Heritage Valley Health System, said “We are very proud of this recognition. Our physicians and staff have worked tirelessly over the past several years to provide exceptional health services so that our patients receive the highest level of care in a clean and quiet environment. Under the leadership of our board of directors, we have remained focused on improving quality, safety, efficiency and financial stability in order to better serve our patients and community.”

About Heritage Valley Health System
Heritage Valley Beaver is part of Heritage Valley Health System, which provides comprehensive health care for residents of Allegheny, Beaver, Butler and Lawrence counties, in Pennsylvania; eastern Ohio and the panhandle of West Virginia. In partnership with more than 400 physicians, Heritage Valley offers a broad range of medical, surgical and diagnostic services at its two hospitals, Heritage Valley Beaver and Heritage Valley Sewickley; in physician offices; community satellite facilities; and in patients' homes.