RESEARCH PAPER 

COMPARISON OF BALDRIGE AWARD 

APPLICANTS AND RECIPIENTS WITH 

PEER HOSPITALS ON A NATIONAL 

BALANCED SCORECARD 

DAVID A. FOSTER, PHD, MPH 

CENTER FOR HEALTHCARE ANALYTICS 

JEAN CHENOWETH, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT 

CENTER FOR HEALTHCARE IMPROVEMENT AND 

100 Top HospiTals®

 PROGRAMS 

OCTOBER 2011 

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
�

The Malcolm T. Baldrige National Quality Award process 

has long been recognized as an extraordinary means for 

for-profit, not-for-profit, and healthcare organizations to 

improve organizational performance and competitiveness 

globally. Historically, it has not been possible to establish 

a causal relationship between use of the Baldrige process 

and the success of healthcare organizations because 

of the many factors that contribute to organizational 

performance. 

The Baldrige Board of Governors identified the Thomson Reuters 100 Top Hospitals® national study as 

a statistical approach for assessing similar aspects of organizational improvement and performance 

in hospitals and health systems. This research investigates the relationship between healthcare 

organizations that have achieved recognition through the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award 

process1 and highest performance (top 3 percent of all hospitals) on the 100 Top Hospitals National 

Balanced Scorecard. 

The results of this study demonstrate a number of strong associations between the performance of 

Baldrige hospitals (award winners and applicants receiving site visits) and 100 Top Hospitals award 

winners. The analyses show: 

•	� There is substantial agreement between the results of the Baldrige process and the data-based 100 Top 

Hospitals award: Hospitals that have been Baldrige award recipients are significantly more likely than 

their peers to win a 100 Top Hospitals national award. 

•	� Baldrige hospitals were significantly more likely than their peers to display faster five-year performance 

improvement. 

•	� Baldrige hospitals, as a group, were about 83 percent more likely than non-Baldrige hospitals to be 

awarded a 100 Top Hospitals national award for excellence in balanced organization-wide performance. 

•	� Baldrige hospitals outperformed non-Baldrige hospitals on nearly all of the individual measures of 

performance used in the 100 Top Hospitals composite score. 

The results demonstrate that hospitals using the Baldrige process exhibit significantly higher rates of 

improvement in balanced organizational performance than non-Baldrige hospitals. And hospitals using 

the Baldrige process are significantly more likely than peers to become 100 Top Hospitals award winners, 

thereby achieving performance equal to or better than the top 3 percent. Although the Baldrige process 

and the 100 Top Hospitals statistical measurements are quite different, the results of this study suggest 

that the methods are complementary and identify similarly high-achieving organizations. 

INTRODUCTION 

The Baldrige Program was established by the United States Congress in 1987 for the purpose of improving 

the competitiveness and performance of U.S. organizations. In 2001, the Award, originally open only to 

for-profit businesses, was expanded to include organizations in the education and healthcare sectors. 

Baldrige Award Research 1 
Assessing the impact the program has on the performance of the not-for-profit and government 

organizations is challenging because of the absence of normative data and comparisons. The Baldrige 

program recognizes that many factors contribute to the performance of complex organizations and 

that demonstrating causal relationships between the use of the Baldrige approach and any particular 

organization’s success, or lack thereof, would be difficult. More recently, efforts to demonstrate such 

impact have turned to assessing whether organizations that have demonstrated a certain level of maturity 

in their use of the Baldrige approach outperform their industry as a whole on key metrics, when such 

metrics are available. 

The healthcare sector is of particular interest to Baldrige program stakeholders. Since 2005, healthcare 

organizations have represented more than 50 percent of the applicants for the Baldrige Award 

as healthcare spending approaches 20 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. In viewing 

organizational performance, the Baldrige criteria take a balanced approach requiring the evaluation of 

results across five categories: product and process (healthcare) outcomes, customer-focused outcomes, 

workforce-focused outcomes, leadership and governance outcomes, and financial and market outcomes. 

To assess the success of the program in the healthcare sector, the program made an effort to identify a 

data set that would closely match this view. 

The 100 Top Hospitals program was selected because it uses independent public data to measure the 

overall organizational performance of hospitals and health systems to identify those organizations that 

set the national benchmarks for delivering balanced excellence (quality, efficiency, financial stability, 

and patient satisfaction) and high value to the communities served. The program is based on a national 

balanced scorecard2

 and reflects the impact of leadership on achievement of organizational mission 

and goals. 

To continue the Baldrige commitment to protecting the privacy of individual applications, and to focus on 

effective users of the Baldrige approach, it was decided to study all hospitals identified by the Baldrige 

Panel of Judges as potential role model organizations. This included all Baldrige Award winners and all 

organizations that received site visits in the past five years. The applications of award recipients are in the 

public domain. Permission to review the applications was received from those reaching the site visit stage, 

from 2002-2010, without public identification. This group was then compared to the 100 Top Hospitals 

data sets in an attempt to assess the value created by organizations employing the Baldrige approach. 

The 100 Top Hospitals study is annual, quantitative research that identifies the hospitals with the best 

facility-wide performance.3 For 18 years, the 100 Top Hospitals research has helped hospital leaders gain 

an objective comparison of their performance to similar hospitals and develop a balanced plan to reach 

for excellence. At the heart of this research is the 100 Top Hospitals National Balanced Scorecard, a set of 

actionable measures that evaluates performance excellence in clinical care, patient perception of care, 

operational efficiency, and financial stability. 

The 100 Top Hospitals study was selected as a basis for comparison because the study’s measurement 

areas match well with the Baldrige performance categories. This table shows how the two organizations’ 

performance metrics align: 

BAldRigE OutCOmES 100 Top HospiTals PERfORmAnCE CAtEgORiES 

Leadership and governance Composite score 

Product and process Patient outcomes: mortality, complications, patient safety, core 

measures 

Customer focus HCAHPS score 

Financial and market Profitability, expenses, length of stay 

Both methods show a correlation between strong governance and high performance on a balanced 

scorecard, a concept that is backed up by research, including that of Dr. Lawrence Prybil.4 

2 Baldrige Award Research 
METHODOLOGY 

Data Sources 

Baldrige provided a list of 38 hospitals to be included in this study. This list includes nine Baldrige award 

applicants with site visits since 2007 (site-visit hospitals that gave permission for release of identities) and 

29 hospitals that won a Baldrige award between 2002–2010. This group of 38 is referred to collectively 

as “Baldrige hospitals” throughout this document. Those who won a Baldrige award are called “Baldrige 

winners.” All other hospitals in the study are assumed to have no Baldrige activity (neither a site visit nor 

an award) and are referred to as non-Baldrige hospitals, or peers. 

Baldrige winners are selected by evaluating results across five categories: product and process (health 

care) outcomes, customer-focused outcomes, workforce-focused outcomes, leadership and governance 

outcomes, and financial and market outcomes. They are also evaluated against six process categories. 

We used 100 Top Hospitals databases to identify hospitals that have received a 100 Top Hospitals award for 

current organization-wide performance (100 Top Hospitals national award winners) or the highest five-year 

rate of performance improvement (100 Top Hospitals: Performance Improvement Leaders5 award). 

Thomson Reuters identifies 100 Top Hospitals award winners using public data and a balanced scorecard 

with a focus on four domains — quality, efficiency, finance, and consumer assessment of care. The study 

accounts for differences in size and teaching status and uses only publicly available data. We compared 

Baldrige hospitals to hospitals included in 100 Top Hospitals studies with data from years 2002–2009. 

The 100 Top Hospitals studies generally include approximately 3,000 hospitals. Among these in-study 

hospitals, there were a mixture of Baldrige and non-Baldrige hospitals. See the appendix for more 

information about the 100 Top Hospitals study methodology. 

Analysis 

To determine associations between the Baldrige and 100 Top Hospitals designations of hospital 

performance and improvement, we: 

•	� Measured the association between Baldrige hospitals and the overall, organization-level score 

(composite) on the 100 Top Hospitals performance metric, for data years 2002–2009. 

•	� Measured the association between Baldrige hospitals and individual metrics comprising the 100 Top 

Hospitals composite performance measures, for data years 2005–2009: 

–	�Risk-adjusted mortality index (in-hospital) 

–	�Risk-adjusted complications index 

–	�Risk-adjusted patient safety index 

–	�Core measures mean percent 

–	�Severity-adjusted average length of stay 

–	�Case mix- and wage-adjusted inpatient expense per discharge 

–	�Adjusted operating profit margin 

•	� Assessed whether Baldrige award winners are more or less likely to demonstrate faster rates of 

improvement than peers on the 100 Top Hospitals organization-level composite score and/or the 

individual performance measures listed above. 

•	� Evaluated whether Baldrige award winners are more or less likely to be 100 Top Hospitals winners than 

non-Baldrige award winners, for data years 2002–2009. 

In the initial analyses, we used descriptive statistics to characterize counts, proportions, and averages. The 

comparative analyses required adjustment for the 100 Top Hospitals comparison group (small, medium, 

and large community; teaching, and major teaching hospitals — see appendix for details) because all 100 

Top Hospitals rankings and identification of winners are comparison-group specific. 

We used regression models in the analytical comparisons to evaluate the likelihood that Baldrige 

hospitals would also be hospitals that received recognition as a national 100 Top Hospitals award winner 

or as having significant five-year improvement rates. 

Baldrige Award Research 3 
Though this study aims to uncover associations between the Baldrige and 100 Top Hospitals designations 

of hospital performance and improvement, it is not possible to identify causal relationships. In particular, 

the timing of any associations between Baldrige hospitals and 100 Top Hospitals performance is uncertain. 

To evaluate this issue, we established lag periods in either direction to characterize the strength of any 

discovered associations in terms of temporal relationships between Baldrige and 100 Top Hospitals 

awards. 

The unit of analysis for this investigation was the hospital year. These analyses treated each hospital with 

one year of data as a unit of analysis. When that hospital had a new year of data, it would then represent 

a new unit of analysis. Note that in any given year of 100 Top Hospitals data, the number of Baldrige 

hospitals that match with the 100 Top Hospitals in-study hospitals may vary due to standard exclusions 

that are implemented when producing the 100 Top Hospitals study databases. 

We compared the evaluation between Baldrige activity and 100 Top Hospitals performance across 13 time 

lags, which are defined as the number of years between the Baldrige activity for any given hospital and 

that hospital’s performance on 100 Top Hospitals. The 13 lag periods range from -6 years, in which the 100 

Top Hospitals evaluations occurred six years before the Baldrige activity, to +6 years, in which the 100 Top 

Hospitals award would or would not have been received six years after the Baldrige activity. 

In general, we made the comparisons between Baldrige and 100 Top Hospitals by matching the Baldrige 

winners and site-visit hospitals, or, for some analyses, just Baldrige winners, with all in-study hospitals 

included in a given 100 Top Hospitals study. This allowed us to evaluate the proportion of hospitals, either 

Baldrige or non-Baldrige, that were awarded 100 Top Hospitals status. To adjust for hospital comparison 

group, these comparisons were implemented through the application of either linear or logistic regression 

models in which a hospital comparison group was entered as a categorical adjustment variable. The 

analysis of lag-periods was, as were other analyses, adjusted for a hospital comparison group, but 

additionally included adjustment for year of data. 

RESULTS 

Baldrige Award Recipients More Likely to be 100 Top Hospitals Award Winners 

When evaluating what proportion of Baldrige winners (excluding site-visit hospitals as defined above) won 

a 100 Top Hospitals award with data from 2002–2009, we found the following (Figure 1): 

•	� Baldrige hospitals were more than twice as likely as their peers to win a 100 Top Hospitals national 

award. A full 7 percent of Baldrige winner hospitals also won a 100 Top Hospitals award, while only 

about 3 percent of their non-Baldrige peers won. 

•	� Baldrige hospitals were more likely than their peers to display top five-year performance improvement. 

More than 27 percent of Baldrige winner hospitals also won a 100 Top Hospitals: Performance 

Improvement Leaders (PIL) award, while only 3 percent of their non-Baldrige peers won the award. This 

association was not seen in previous years of the PIL study. This result was based on the most recent 

100 Top Hospitals longitudinal study of performance improvement, which used data years 2005–2009. 

Earlier 100 Top Hospitals longitudinal, or performance improvement, studies did not show a statistically 

significant difference between Baldrige winners and non-Baldrige winner hospitals. 

•	� These differences are statistically (and substantively) significant. 

•	� These statistics were developed using the regression model to adjust for hospital size and teaching 

status (100 Top Hospitals comparison groups — see appendix for details). 

4 Baldrige Award Research 
figuRE 1: HOSPitAlS ACHiEving 100 Top HospiTals StAtuS in PERfORmAnCE And imPROvEmEnt* 

30% 

25% 

20% 

15% 

10% 

5% 

0% 

n Non-Baldrige Winner 

n Baldrige Winner 

100 Top Hospitals Organization-Wide Performance 100 Top Hospitals 5-Year Performance Improvement 

*Organization-wide performance includes data years 2002–2009. Five-year improvement includes data years 2005–2009. 

Associations Between Baldrige and 100 Top Hospitals Awards: Detailed Results 

We performed a lag-time analysis to evaluate whether there was a temporal relationship between 

achievement in Baldrige and the 100 Top Hospitals study. In other words, we wanted to find whether the 

data suggested that winning Baldrige most often preceded winning 100 Top Hospitals status, if there 

was no apparent temporal relationship between Baldrige and 100 Top Hospitals success, or if it most 

often happened that winning 100 Top Hospitals status preceded winning the Baldrige award. To do this, 

we compared the proportion of hospitals that did receive a 100 Top Hospitals award among the Baldrige 

hospitals (winners and site visit hospitals) within given lag periods. 

Over the 13 lag periods, Baldrige hospitals showed an overall proportion of winners of 100 Top Hospitals 

awards of 6.14 percent, whereas the non-Baldrige hospitals were 100 Top Hospitals winners at a rate of 

3.35 percent. Therefore, the Baldrige hospitals, as a group, were about 83 percent more likely than nonBaldrige activity hospitals to be awarded the 100 Top Hospitals national (organization-wide performance) 

award. 

In 10 of the 13 lag periods examined, the Baldrige activity hospitals showed a higher proportion of 100 Top 

Hospitals winners than did the non-Baldrige hospitals. Only the +3 year lag was statistically significant 

(p = 0.007, odds ratio 5.999, 95 percent confidence interval 1.627–22.120), showing that Baldrige activity 

hospitals were about six times as likely as non-Baldrige activity hospitals to be 100 Top Hospitals winners. 

The overall pattern is clear — the Baldrige activity hospitals had consistently higher rates of success in the 

100 Top Hospitals national study. These findings are shown in Figure 2 and Table 1 (see next page). 

Baldrige Award Research 5 
 -

 

--

figuRE 2: PERCEnt Of HOSPitAlS idEntifiEd AS 100 Top HospiTals WinnERS, By timE lAg Hospital Winning 100 Top Hospitals Awards (%) 

20 

18 

16 

14 

12 

10 

8 

6 

4 

2 

0 

n Non-Baldrige Winner 

n Baldrige Winner 

No Baldrige 

hospitals won a 

100 Top Hospitals 

award this year 

-6 -5 -4 -3 -2 -1 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 Overall 

100 Top Hospitals Comparison Data in Years Before or After Baldrige Activity 

tABlE 1: StAtiStiCS fOR BAldRigE And nOn BAldRigE HOSPitAlS idEntifiEd AS 100 Top HospiTals 

WinnERS 

BaLDRIGE NUMBER Of 

LaG (YEaRS HOSPITaLS BaLDRIGE 

BEfORE INCLUDED HOSPITaLS 

OR afTER IN 100 Top THaT WERE 

BaLDRIGE HospiTals 100 Top 

aCTIvITY) STUDY HospiTals 

DaTaBaSE WINNERS 

DIffERENCE 

BETWEEN 

100 Top HospiTals NaTIONaL BaLDRIGE 

aWaRD WINNERS (%) aND NONBaLDRIGE 

HOSPITaLS (%) 

BaLDRIGE 

HOSPITaLS 

NONBaLDRIGE 

HOSPITaLS 

10.00 3.35 2.412 

6.67 3.35 1.621 

6.67 3.35 1.493 

11.11 3.34 2.560 

5.26 3.35 1.152 

9.52 3.34 2.241 

3.57 3.35 0.873 

4.76 3.35 1.225 

0.00 3.35 N/A* 

20.00 3.34 5.999 

6.25 3.35 1.355 

0.00 3.35 N/A* 

0.00 3.35 N/A* 

6.14 3.35 --

P-vaLUE 

0.410 

0.644 

0.702 

0.216 

0.891 

0.284 

0.895 

0.844 

0.967 

0.007 

0.771 

0.958 

0.960 

-6 10 1 

-5 15 1 

-4 15 1 

-3 18 2 

-2 19 1 

-1 21 2 

0 28 1 

1 21 1 

2 21 0 

3 15 3 

4 16 1 

5 15 0 

6 14 0 

Overall 228 14 

*No Baldrige hospitals won a 100 Top Hospitals national award this year. 

6 Baldrige Award Research 
 -

 

Performance Measure-Specific Results With Lag Time 

The next phase of the analysis focused on measure-specific results. We made these comparisons at lag 

year +3 because the analysis of lag times indicated that this time difference showed the largest difference 

between Baldrige and non-Baldrige hospitals in terms of winning the 100 Top Hospitals award. 

To compare the two groups, we placed hospitals in percentiles of performance, then averaged the 

percentile for each group. With the exception of expense per adjusted discharge, the Baldrige hospitals 

outperformed non-Baldrige hospitals on all of the 100 Top Hospitals measures used in these study years, 

although only the Core Measures results were statistically significant. We analyzed both adjusted and 

non-adjusted data (adjusted for hospital comparison group). Table 2 shows the results. 

tABlE 2: BAldRigE And nOn BAldRigE PERfORmAnCE On 100 Top HospiTals PERfORmAnCE 

mEASuRES 

PERCENTILE PERfORMaNCE (HIGHER 

100 Top HospiTals 

IS BETTER), NON-aDjUSTED 

PERfORMaNCE MEaSURE 

BaLDRIGE NON-BaLDRIGE 

Risk-Adjusted Mortality Index 56.820 50.010 

Risk-Adjusted Complications 51.540 50.020 

Index 

Patient Safety Index 58.230 50.010 

Core Measures Score* 88.810 86.320 

Severity-Adjusted Average 59.280 50.010 

Length of Stay† 

Case Mix- and Wage-Adjusted $6,015 $5,920 

Inpatient Expense* 

Adjusted Operating Profit 4.787% 3.186% 

Margin* 

P-vaLUE 

0.311 

0.861 

0.274 

0.016 

0.109 

0.530 

0.798 

BaLDRIGE vERSUS
 

NON-BaLDRIGE§
 

DIffERENCE 

7.57% 

1.30% 

8.17% 

4.90 percentage 

points 

11.69% 

$346 

2.03 percentage 

points 

BaLDRIGE
 

HOSPITaLS
 

PERfORMED...
 

Better 

Better 

Better 

Better 

Better 

Worse 

Better 

* Original units reported in CMS data (i.e., not percentile data) because these measures are not normalized by hospital comparison group (bed size 

and teaching status). 

† For this measure, lower is better.
�

§ Adjusted for hospital comparison group. 

LIMITaTIONS 

Thomson Reuters relies on the accuracy of Medicare administrative claims data and does not attempt 

to infer or correct values found therein. Hospitals missing data required to calculate 100 Top Hospitals 

performance measures are excluded from the study, as are: 

• Specialty hospitals 

• Federally owned hospitals 

• Non-U.S. hospitals 

• Hospitals with fewer than 25 acute-care beds 

• Hospitals with fewer than 100 Medicare patient discharges in the year of study 

• Hospitals with Medicare average lengths of stay longer than 25 days in the year of study 

• Hospitals with no reported Medicare patient deaths in the year of study 

• Hospitals for which a current Medicare Cost Report was not available 

• Hospitals with a current Medicare Cost Report not based on a 12-month reporting period 

The statistical analyses used here do not take into account the “nesting” or lack of independence within 

results for a given hospital involving multiple ascertainment of the same hospital over time. In other 

words, when a hospital contributes multiple hospital years of information based on multiple years of the 

study — while each of those years is in fact representative of a different sample of patients — technically, 

the hospital results for multiple years of ascertainment would be more highly correlated across those 

multiple years than they would be for the results across multiple hospitals. Even so, this limitation would 

Baldrige Award Research 7 
tend to impact estimates of the variance rather than estimates of the differences in performance between 

Baldrige and non-Baldrige hospitals. 

It should also be noted that in the 100 Top Hospitals database, hospitals that file cost reports jointly with 

other hospitals under one provider number are analyzed as one organization. Baldrige applicants, on the 

other hand, can define the number of hospitals included in their application. For this research, we used 

the application definition. 

Another limitation of this investigation is that administrative data are being used. While it is very common 

practice in the industry to use administrative data, it is acknowledged that such data does not contain the 

kind of clinically detailed information that would be ideal for risk adjustment. Therefore, any reports of 

associations here are not meant to imply a causal connection. In other words, we can study correlations 

or associations here, but cannot make conclusions related to actual cause-and-effect type of relationships. 

CONCLUSIONS 

Despite difficulties related to sparse data spread over many years, the results of this investigation clearly 

show that Baldrige hospitals (those that won the Baldrige Award or had site visits related to the award), 

performed better than similar hospitals (by bed size and teaching status) that were not Baldrige hospitals. 

Specifically, when we examined the three-year lag between the Baldrige activity and subsequently 

winning the 100 Top Hospitals national award, we found the Baldrige-activity hospitals to be almost 

six times as likely to become 100 Top Hospitals winners as non-Baldrige hospitals. The difference was 

statistically significant. 

In examining the measure-specific differences between Baldrige and non-Baldrige hospitals, it is 

noteworthy that every measure used in the 100 Top Hospitals study except — expense per adjusted 

discharge — showed better performance by the Baldrige hospitals than for the non-Baldrige hospitals, 

although only Core Measures showed a statistically significant difference. In other words, while only one 

measure difference was statistically significant, almost all measures showed the same pattern of better 

performance by the Baldrige activity hospitals. 

Finally, in examining the longitudinal performance using the 100 Top Hospitals Performance Improvement 

Leadership study for data years 2005–2009, we again see a statistically significantly higher rate of 100 

Top Hospitals awards for improvement over time among the Baldrige activity hospitals compared with 

non-Baldrige hospitals. 

Despite severe limitations in sample size, the results of this investigation clearly reveal that hospitals with 

Baldrige activity outperform similar hospitals without Baldrige activity. 

8 Baldrige Award Research 
aPPENDIX: 100 Top HospiTals, 2011 STUDY METHODOLOGY SUMMaRY 

The 100 Top Hospitals is a quantitative study that identifies 100 hospitals with the highest achievement 

on a balanced scorecard based on Norton and Kaplan’s2 concept with a focus on four domains — quality, 

efficiency, finance, and consumer assessment of care. The study accounts for differences in size and 

teaching status and uses only publicly available data. The 100 Top Hospitals studies provide numerous 

examples of performance excellence, as evidenced in a number of published studies.6-22 The four main 

steps we take in selecting the 100 Top Hospitals are: 

1. Building the database of hospitals, including special selection and exclusion criteria. The study focuses 

on short-term, acute-care, non-federal U.S. hospitals that treat a broad spectrum of patients. The data 

come from public sources including the Medicare Provider Analysis and Review (MedPAR) dataset, the 

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Hospital Compare dataset, and the Medicare Cost 

Report. The 2011 study included 2,914 hospitals. 

2. Classifying hospitals into comparison groups according to bed size and teaching status. (The number of 

hospitals included in the 2011 study is in parentheses): 

•	� Major teaching hospitals (175) 

•	� Teaching hospitals (435) 

•	� Large community hospitals (338) 

•	� Medium community hospitals (1,042) 

•	� Small community hospitals (924) 

3. Scoring hospitals on 10 performance measures: 

•	� Risk-adjusted mortality index (in-hospital) 

•	� Risk-adjusted complications index 

•	� Risk-adjusted patient safety index 

•	� Core measures mean percent 

•	� 30-day, risk-adjusted mortality rate for acute myocardial infarction (AMI), heart failure, and 

pneumonia*
�

•	� 30-day, risk-adjusted readmission rate for AMI, heart failure, and pneumonia* 

•	� Severity-adjusted average length of stay 

•	� Case mix- and wage-adjusted inpatient expense per discharge 

•	� Profitability (adjusted operating profit margin) 

•	� Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) score (patient rating 

of overall hospital performance)* 

*Not included in the Baldrige/100 Top Hospitals analysis because results were not available for all data years. 

4. Determining the 100 Top Hospitals award winners by ranking hospitals relative to their comparison 

group. Within the five hospital comparison groups, we ranked hospitals on the basis of their 

performance on each of the 10 measures relative to other hospitals in their group. We then summed 

each hospital’s performance-measure rankings and re-ranked, overall, to arrive at a final rank for the 

hospital. The hospitals with the best final rank in each comparison group were selected as the winners. 

All measures except the 30-day mortality rate and 30-day readmission rate received a weight of one in 

the final ranking process. For the 30-day mortality and readmission rate measures, we give the rates for 

each of the conditions (AMI, heart failure, and pneumonia) a weight of 1/6 in the final 100 Top Hospitals 

ranking process for winner selection. 

For a detailed methodology of the 100 Top Hospitals study, you may download the study abstract at 

www.100tophospitals.com/top-national-hospitals/. 

Baldrige Award Research 9 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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