Clara Maass Hospital Gets ‘Patient Safety Excellence Award’

BELLEVILLE, NJ — Clara Maass Medical Center in Belleville recently received a Healthgrades 2020 Patient Safety Excellence Award. It’s a distinction that places it among the top 5 percent of all short-term, acute-care hospitals reporting patient safety data, as evaluated by Healthgrades.

According to hospital administrators, during the study period (2016-2018), the recognized hospitals demonstrated “excellent performance” in safeguarding patients in the Medicare population, as measured by objective outcomes — risk-adjusted patient safety indicator (PSI) rates — for 13 PSIs defined by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

View Healthgrades hospital quality methodologies.

“We have made a number of significant improvements to move towards clinical excellence, such as increasing the size of our infection prevention team, which has been particularly vital to our patient safety efforts,” said Naveen Ballem, chief medical officer at Clara Maass.

“Having earned another recognition for Patient Safety, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, affirms that that our leadership team has made the right investments in our clinical effectiveness initiatives,” Ballem said.

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