Pen Bay Medical Center is a preferred hospital, maintaining its status from the Maine State Employee Health Commission (SEHC). Pen Bay continues to earn excellent ratings in the revised methodology established by the Employee Health Commission.
The state’s rating system was revised in August 2011 in response to the Commission’s intent to weight the measures posted on the Maine Health Management Coalition’s new website, getbettermaine.org, and to incorporate comparative cost into the criteria used for hospital ranking.
Maine Health Management Coalition, through its foundation, has been collecting and publicly reporting quality data on all of the state’s 39 hospitals and about half its physician practices.
In April 2011, the Coalition revamped its website, getbettermaine.org, which rates hospitals and practices on a number of factors, like heart attack care and surgical infections, giving them a low, good, better or best rating.
A physician practice is considered preferred if they rate good, better or best in at least two categories. The hospital ratings presented on the website are informational and cannot be used to determine preferred status with the SEHC.
The SEHC will continue to use the performance reported on the Coalition’s website and will augment those data with the results of the comparative hospital payment reports.
The Coalition website presents performance in the following three categories: Effective (treatment of heart attack, heart failure, and pneumonia), Safe (preventing surgical infections, medication safety and national safe practice survey), and Patient Satisfaction (overall experience and would you recommend).
Pen Bay rates “better” and/or “best” within the Effective category for pneumonia and heart failure care and Safe category for preventing surgical infections, medication safety and national safe practice survey.
Pen Bay Healthcare is a member of the MaineHealth system. For more information, please visit penbayhealthcare.org.
