Wilcox Medical Center has received an overall hospital quality star rating of 5 stars from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in its 2021 star ratings update. Wilcox is one of only seven hospitals in Hawaii to achieve a 5-star rating, and is one of 455 hospitals out of 4,586 across the United States to receive five stars.
“We are honored to receive this five-star distinction, as it reflects the safe, high-quality care that patients receive at Wilcox Medical Center,” said Jen H. Chahanovich, president and CEO of Wilcox Medical Center and CEO of Kauai Medical Clinic. “This rating is the result of the hard work and dedication of our team at Wilcox and their commitment to provide the best possible care for our community.”
Wilcox now joins Hawaii Pacific Health’s two other acute care hospitals – Pali Momi Medical Center and Straub Medical Center – in achieving the CMS 5-star rating. Straub was the first hospital in Hawaii to earn 5 stars.
CMS assigned star ratings to hospitals nationwide based on their performance in five quality categories – mortality, safety of care, readmission, patient experience, and timely and effective care. Star ratings are designed to make it easier for patients to use published information to compare hospitals in terms of health care quality and excellence.
The Overall Hospital Quality Star Rating combines up to 100 measures already available on Hospital Compare into one star rating. The measures fall into the five quality categories and CMS assigns weights to the group scores, and then calculates an overall rating using the summary score. All hospitals with sufficient information are then given a rating of one to five stars, with five stars being the best. Hospitals report data to CMS through the Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting Program and the Hospital Outpatient Quality Reporting Program. A hospital’s overall rating is calculated using only those measures for which data are available.
Wilcox is the largest medical center on Kauai and provides its patients with expert diagnosis and treatments in more than 30 different medical specialty areas, including cardiology, emergency, family practice, gastroenterology, health management, internal medicine, neurology, OB-GYN, oncology, orthopedics, pediatrics and urology.
For more information about the Hospital Compare rankings, visit Medicare.gov/HospitalCompare.