North Shore-LIJ Health System Begins Online Posting of Hospital Infection Rates, Other Performance I...( Becomes NY's 2nd healthcare provide...),Health

Becomes NY's 2nd healthcare provider to publicly release quality data as

part of bold effort to improve patient safety

GREAT NECK, N.Y., Oct. 2 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- As part of a far- reaching effort to enhance patient safety, strengthen accountability and improve quality of care, the North Shore-LIJ Health System announced today that it has started to publicly disclose infection rates at 10 of its hospitals on Long Island, Queens and Staten Island, NY.

One of the nation's largest health systems with $4.5 billion in annual revenues, North Shore-LIJ is New York State's first non-public hospital to publicly report information on the prevalence of infections at its hospitals. The information is posted on North Shore-LIJ's new quality website, accessible at http://www.northshorelij.com/quality. The site also includes information on its hospitals' performance in treating patients for heart attacks, heart failure and pneumonia, as well as their success in performing cardiac bypass and joint replacement surgeries.

"For far too long, hospitals and other healthcare providers have operated in a vacuum in interacting with the public," said Michael J. Dowling, president and chief executive officer of the North Shore-LIJ Health System, the nation's third-largest, non-profit healthcare provider. "The more information made available to the public on how well hospitals perform, the more transparent the healthcare system becomes to consumers -- and that's a good thing because greater scrutiny will produce improvements in the quality of care."

The Web site includes three years of data for 10 North Shore-LIJ hospitals on five common healthcare-related infections:

-- Ventilator-associated pneumonia: Some hospitalized patients are placed

on a ventilator to help them breathe, increasing their risk of

acquiring an infection known as ventilator ass
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