SACRAMENTO, Calif. —Integrated Healthcare Association (IHA) has recognized six Sutter Medical Network (SMN) organizations for achieving top marks on quality and/or patient experience measures while effectively managing cost of care for Commercial HMO patients in 2019.

Excellence in Healthcare Award

The Excellence in Healthcare Award represents the highest level of achievement awarded by the IHA. To earn this award, physician organizations must perform in the top 50th percentile across three domains: clinical quality, patient experience and total cost of care for their commercial HMO population.

Sutter Medical Group, part of Sutter Medical Foundation, was one of just 20 physician organizations statewide to receive a 2020 Excellence in Healthcare Award from IHA. Of the nearly 200 physician organizations statewide participating in the Align. Measure. Perform. program, one in ten received an Excellence in Healthcare Award this year.

Exemplary Performance

IHA also recognizes physician organizations that demonstrated exemplary domain-specific performance. Sutter-affiliated Mills-Peninsula Medical Group and Palo Alto Foundation Medical Group, both affiliated with the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, achieved high performance (top 10th percentile) in the clinical quality and patient experience domains. Three more Sutter-affiliated physician organizations, Sutter Medical Group, Gould Medical Group, and Sutter East Bay Medical Group achieved high performance (top 10th percentile) in the patient experience domain only.

Most Improved

IHA also recognizes eight physician organizations—one from each region— that demonstrate the greatest year-to-year improvement in clinical quality and patient experience domains. Sutter Independent Physicians* earned the Ronald P. Bangasser Most Improved honor for making the greatest improvements in quality and patient experience from 2018-2019 among all physician organizations in the Sacramento and Northern California Region.

Sutter Medical Network is part of Sutter Health’s not-for-profit network of care, which proactively implements programs across its system that continuously improve the quality and value of healthcare for patients. Integration across Sutter’s regions, clinical settings and data environments is delivering care models with some of the best clinical outcomes in the nation.

* Sutter Independent Physicians contracts with Sutter Valley Medical Foundation to provide care to its HMO and SutterSelect patients.