Thomson® Top 100 Hospital
Magnet Hospital Designation
Beacon Award
U.S. News & World Report - Top 50 Ranking
Solucient® Insight and Gold Star Awards
Joint Commission Accreditation
VHA Leadership Award
Compass Award

Thomson Top 100 Hospital
Thomson®, a leading health care data company, recognized St. Cloud Hospital as a Top 100 Hospital for 2007. St. Cloud Hospital was one of 100 hospitals selected from a final pool of more than 3,000 hospitals nationwide.

St. Cloud Hospital was honored in the “teaching hospitals” category. The only other Minnesota hospital named to the top 100 list is Lakeview Hospital in Stillwater, in the “small community hospitals” category. St. Cloud and Lakeview were the only Minnesota facilities recognized last year, as well.

In the Top 100 program’s 15 years, St. Cloud Hospital has been recognized six times - in 1993, 1994, 1999, 2005, 2006 and 2007.

The 100 Top Hospitals award is based on objective statistical measurements of hospital performance across four critical areas: clinical outcomes, patient safety, operational efficiency and financial stability.

Top 100 Hospitals have better patient outcomes, higher survival rates, fewer complications and lower costs.

In addition to the Top 100 Hospitals award, the Central Minnesota Heart Center at St. Cloud Hospital was ranked for seven consecutive years as one of the nation's "Top 100 Cardiovascular Hospitals."

To learn more about the Top 100 Hospitals, visit www.100tophospitals.com.

Magnet Hospital Designation
St. Cloud Hospital earned the prestigious honor of Magnet Designation in 2004. Magnet Designation is the highest national or international recognition for excellence in the delivery of Nursing services that are provided in a professional practice environment, promote quality and evidence-based practice, and result in positive patient outcomes.

The Magnet Recognition Program is administered through the American Nurses Credentialing Center. It was established in 1990 and provides a method of recognizing hospitals that create and maintain a professional practice environment that ensures quality patient outcomes. Learn more about the Magnet Designation.

Beacon Award for Critical Care Excellence
St. Cloud Hospital’s Intensive Care Unit (ICU) earned the Beacon Award for Critical Care Excellence, an award given by the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN) and specifically designated to recognize the nation’s top hospital critical care units. Critical care units that receive the Beacon Award have exhibited high quality standards, exceptional care of patients and their families and healthy work environments.

U.S. News & World Report - Top 50 Ranking
St. Cloud Hospital made U.S. News & World Report’s 2007 list of the nation’s top 50 hospitals for orthopedics. The hospital was previously recognized by U.S. News for its work in endocrinology and urology.

Solucient Insight and Gold Star Awards
St. Cloud Hospital was one of 12 hospitals nationwide recognized by Solucient for excellence in performance improvement with the presentation of the first Insight Awards in May 2005.

The winners of the Insight Awards demonstrated excellent use of one or more of Solucient’s products or services to achieve success at their organizations, including improving patient care and outcomes, becoming more efficient or improving their outreach to the community.

St. Cloud Hospital also was honored with a Gold Star Award. The award promotes:

• understanding of the requirements for the quality and integrity of operational benchmarking data; 
• understanding of the uses of external benchmarks in performance improvement; 
• sharing of information about successful performance improvement methods using Solucient’s operational improvement products; 
• data quality. 

Joint Commission Accreditation
In August 2007, St. Cloud Hospital underwent a five-day survey which resulted in Full Accreditation. This survey covered all St. Cloud Hospital departments, including Home Care/Hospice, Laboratory, Ambulatory Care and Behavioral Health Services. Learn more about Joint Commission Accreditation in our Patient Safety section.

VHA Leadership Award
St. Cloud Hospital was honored with a 2004 VHA Leadership Award for excellence in supply chain management. With support from the entire staff and physicians, we implemented a supply standardization and utilization initiative, which surpassed financial goals set for the project, and resulted in savings of $7 million in supply costs and $840,000 in savings through improved clinical utilization.Decreasing the variability in supplies actually helps to make care safer.

VHA Inc., formerly known as Voluntary Hospitals of America, is a cooperative that serves 2,200 leading community-owned health care organizations and their affiliated physicians, providing services that help them improve clinical, operational and financial performance.

Compass Award
St. Cloud Hospital won a prestigious national award for performance improvement in patient satisfaction. The Press Ganey 2003 Compass Award recognized St. Cloud Hospital for improving its mean score ratings by 2.66 points over a two-year period; and ranking as one of the top three most-improved hospitals in its category nationwide.

Press Ganey is a large patient satisfaction research company with a database that allows comparison to nearly 6,000 health care facilities nationwide.