‘Measures up with the best’: Cedar City Hospital rises among top hospitals in the country

ST. GEORGE — If hospitals were ranked similar to popular music acts like BTS and Billie Eilish, Cedar City Hospital would be climbing up the pop charts.

Undated photo of the main entrance of Cedar City Hospital, Cedar City, Utah | Photo courtesy of Cedar City Hospital, St. George News

This month, Fortune magazine ranked the Iron County medical facility as the fourth-best small community hospital in the country in its annual Top 100 Hospitals list. That’s one higher than the Intermountain Healthcare hospital’s 2021 rank.

Cedar City Hospital Administrator Eric Packer told St. George News/Cedar City News he was “thrilled” with the ranking but also indicated it wasn’t a case where it wasn’t earned.

“We believe that the quality of care here at Cedar City Hospital measures up with the best facilities anywhere in the country,” Packer said. “We all know that Cedar City and Iron County is a wonderful place to live, and the quality of healthcare I think reflects the quality of life we enjoy here.”

The rankings use IBM’s Watson artificial intelligence system to look at the clinical, operational and financial metrics of 2,650 hospitals and narrows them down to the 100 top scorers. 

Undated photo of medical workers at Cedar City Hospital, Cedar City, Utah | Photo courtesy of Cedar City Hospital, St. George News

“This award comes from one of the most comprehensive studies of hospitals nationwide regarding the quality of care they provide the community – not just in terms of only clinical measures, but also patient satisfaction measures, cost, how a patient does after they’ve been in the hospital, and even how well we support and forward community health,” Packer said.

Under the Fortune criteria, small community hospitals are those with 25-99 beds in service. There were 899 small community hospitals analyzed by IBM and Fortune, with 20 making the list. St. George Regional Hospital, which recently boosted its capacity to 294 beds, is in the large (over 249-bed) hospital category.  

Cedar City Hospital is a 49-bed facility. It is the 11th time the hospital has made the top 100 list.  Another Utah hospital, Alta View Hospital (also an Intermountain facility) in Sandy, got the top ranking in the nation among small community hospitals. 

Unlike Alta View, which earned four stars for financial health, Cedar City netted perfect five-star scores in all four of the major categories of the rankings:  Clinical outcomes, operation efficiency, patient experience and financial health.

There were eight Utah hospitals that made the top 100, which was tied with California for third among U.S. states behind Florida (11 hospitals) and Texas (12).

Copyright St. George News, SaintGeorgeUtah.com LLC, 2022, all rights reserved.

Free News Delivery by Email

Would you like to have the day's news stories delivered right to your inbox every evening? Enter your email below to start!