Sutter’s Mills-Peninsula Medical Center is recognized this week as the only “triple crown” award recipient in California and one of seven hospitals in the nation to receive Healthgrades’ honors in three award categories: Patient Safety, Patient Experience and America’s 50 Best Hospitals. This is the second consecutive year the medical center has earned this esteemed designation.

Healthgrades, an online resource that provides consumers with information about physicians and hospitals, announced the honors as part of their annual Patient Safety Excellence and Outstanding Patient Experience Award™ rankings during National Patient Safety Awareness Week.

Four additional Sutter hospital campuses were awarded Healthgrades’ Patient Safety Excellence recognition for 2024:

• Sutter’s Alta Bates Summit Medical Center – Alta Bates Campus
• Sutter’s Eden Medical Center
• Sutter’s Novato Community Hospital
• Sutter Solano Medical Center

“Our teams are committed to delivering safe, high-quality and equitable care for every patient we serve. Patient safety is at the core of who we are at Sutter Health, driving everything we do,” said William Isenberg, M.D., Sutter Health chief medical and quality officer. “We’re honored to see these efforts recognized by Healthgrades through their national rankings.”

The Patient Safety Excellence Award honors hospitals that have had the lowest occurrences of 14 preventable patient safety events. These hospitals are in the top 10% in the nation for patient safety.

Additionally, Mills-Peninsula Medical Center received Healthgrades’ Outstanding Patient Experience honors for 2024, placing it among the top 15% of hospitals in the nation for patient experience. Healthgrades evaluated more than 2,500 hospitals that submitted at least 100 patient experience surveys to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), covering admissions from January-December 2022.

“These Sutter hospitals have cultivated an outstanding safety culture that prioritizes the well-being of both patients and staff, setting a high standard for patient safety nationwide,” said Brad Bowman, M.D., chief medical officer and head of data science at Healthgrades. “We’re proud to recognize these five Sutter hospitals for providing top-quality care while preventing serious injuries to patients during their hospital stay.”

Safety in Action

As a high-reliability organization, Sutter promotes a culture of safety in which everyone is empowered to speak up about potential safety concerns. Efforts around this work include:

• The launch of Sutter Safe Care in 2018. The program kicked off Sutter’s journey to becoming a high-reliability organization, with comprehensive training of over 65,000 leaders, physicians, advance practice clinicians, and staff.
• Targeted training to onboard new leaders, employees and physicians, to ensure everyone adopts Sutter Safe Care’s high reliability behaviors and key practices.
• A reliability coach program that empowers front line staff to support their peers with high reliability behaviors. Currently, there are over 900 front line reliability coaches across Sutter, and participation in the program continues to grow, year over year.

Click here to learn more about Sutter’s honors from Healthgrades and the methodology.