Cooley Dickinson aspires to become a model community hospital ranked in the top tenth percentile nationwide for the quality of patient care provided at our main campus in Northampton, Mass. as well as at our many affiliated facilities.
Becoming a model community hospital means:
• putting patients’ medical needs first and continually seeking ways to provide the best quality care to patients at home, in the community where they live;
• developing and testing approaches to improvements and sharing our learning with others; and
• making quality and performance data “transparent,” or publicly available to help our community members compare how Cooley Dickinson is providing care relative to national and local benchmarks as well as other to hospitals and medical centers.
Over the past several years, Cooley Dickinson has worked to make our quality data transparent. You can view our results here . If you have specific questions about healthcare quality initiatives at Cooley Dickinson, email our director of quality improvement.
The Larger Picture: A National Model for Quality Care
In today’s medical field, a major challenge to providing quality care is having the financial wherewithal to invest in the hospital’s facility and in ongoing technological developments. These investments don’t just mean better science for improved patient care. Investments in facilities and technology also vastly strengthen a hospital’s ability to recruit and retain the best physicians and staff, who are absolutely critical to the delivery of quality care and patient satisfaction.
Cooley Dickinson is one of the most financially viable hospitals in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. For the past 16 years Cooley Dickinson has run a surplus, which is reinvested each year into facilities and new technology. Based on leadership values and drawing upon our financial strength, Cooley Dickinson Hospital is more actively engaged in and focused on quality improvement efforts than most community hospitals, and we see further opportunities to excel.
In the United States, the vast majority of patient care – approximately 90 percent – is delivered through community hospitals. While academic teaching hospitals are on the cutting edge of new research and technologies, there is a tremendous amount of work to be done to ensure that the nation’s principle conduit of care – community hospitals – delivers the highest quality care possible to the community. Since 2003, Cooley Dickinson Hospital has made a deliberate goal of becoming a national model for what the best community hospitals can be. This means putting patient needs first and doing everything possible to provide the highest quality medical and surgical services that community members in and around Hampshire County need, demand, and deserve. It means testing innovative approaches, improving upon them, and learning. And it means sharing our learning with others.
Cooley Dickinson continues to strive toward becoming a model community hospital. With our sound financial footing, strong board support, and physician and employee commitment, Cooley Dickinson has already made huge strides in our mission to be a national model for community hospital excellence, and our work continues.