Catawba Valley Medical Center (CVMC) has received the only 4-star rating
for a hospital within the Unifour region, which encompasses Alexander,
Burke, Caldwell, and Catawba counties.
Overall Hospital Quality Star Ratings are given annually by the Centers
for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), a federal agency that manages
healthcare programs for the United States. The CMS Star Ratings system,
first introduced eight years ago, helps Medicare consumers compare the
quality of care being offered so they are empowered to make the best health
care decisions for themselves. The CMS Star Ratings can be reviewed at
the Medicare Care Compare website.
Among 4,658 hospitals nationally, only 766 (16 percent) achieved a four-star
rating. CMS uses 46 measures across five domains – mortality rates,
readmission rates, safety, patient experience, and timely and effective
care – to assess a hospital’s performance.
Michelle Lusk, Catawba Valley Health System’s Chief Nursing Officer,
said, “Safety and quality are the top priorities at Catawba Valley
Health System, and we’re proud to show this region our commitment
to patients, their families, and our community. We have an exceptional
team of employees and providers, as well as protocols in place to ensure
that patient safety remains our very top priority every day. This is how
we live out our mission of providing exceptional healthcare to every person,
every time.”
The four-star CMS rating comes after recent news that CVMC earned the only
‘A’ grade from The Leapfrog Group for patient safety in the
Unifour region, the 15th ‘A’ grade in the last 16 reporting periods. The Leapfrog Hospital
Safety Grade uses up to 27 measures of publicly available hospital safety
data to assign grades to more than 2,700 U.S. acute-care hospitals twice per year.