Mercy Health Tiffin Hospital named top small community hospital in nation

May 15—TIFFIN — On the third floor of Mercy Health Tiffin Hospital, Jessica Wise manages the medical-surgical nursing staff. As she makes her rounds through her division's string of rooms, she nearly always recognizes the faces that pass by.

"We are such a small community here. Everybody knows everybody," Ms. Wise said. Soon, Ms. Wise will celebrate 10 years as a nurse, seven of which she has spent in Tiffin.

"There's something about Tiffin that pulls you back. It feels like home," she said.

Recently, Mercy Health Tiffin Hospital was named the number one small community hospital in the nation by Fortune/IBM Watson Health on their 100 Top Hospitals List.

IBM Watson Health, a data analytics health industry partner, identified top hospitals from 2,675 short-term, acute care, non-federal hospitals in the United States. Their annual list recognizes excellence in four areas: clinical outcomes, operational efficiency, patient experience, and financial health. It helps to identify best practices that can be modeled at other healthcare organizations.

This year marks the first time Mercy Health Tiffin Hospital has been recognized with the honor.

"A building is a building. It's brick and mortar," Charles Ervin, Mercy Health administrative director of operations, said. "It's the people that provide the care and make a place what it is."

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The Tiffin hospital received five stars on all four of IBM Watson Health's criteria.

"It is a very difficult time in healthcare," Bob Baxter, Mercy Health Toledo president, said. "This recognition is really a tribute to the team we have in Tiffin. Supporting each other is critical there, especially when it comes to providing great care."

In addition to the four major criteria, for the first time this year, the annual ranking considered a hospital's contributions to community health. Investigators specifically focused on equity.

To be ranked, hospitals were surveyed across three components, regarding community health — as providers of critical services, as partners to community organizations, and as supporters of local economic and social progress. Hospitals received credit for meeting a certain number of best practice standards. Organizations do not apply or pay for this honor or pay to promote their award.

The studies used to determine the lists are based on a scorecard of publicly available metrics and data, including Medicare cost reports, Medicare Provider Analysis and Review data, and data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Hospital Compare website.

This year's scoring and the addition of the new community health measure led to a change in ranking for more than a third of the 100 hospitals.

"There is a culture in Tiffin. It's a culture of ownership," Daniel Barbee, Mercy Health Toledo Rural Market president, said of what sets Mercy Health Tiffin apart. "This hospital has just shined like a star."

Mr. Barbee functions as president for Mercy Health's three rural Toledo area hospitals — Defiance, Willard, and Tiffin. He said that the Tiffin community has offered tremendous support to the hospital and vice versa. Mercy Health Tiffin Hospital provides all of the athletic directors to area high schools and since the onset of the pandemic, has been an early source for coronavirus testing and, now, for rolling out vaccinations.

"Tiffin Hospital would be the hospital of choice for me and my family any day, everyday of the week," Mr. Barbee said, noting that a number of the hospital's staff were born and raised in Tiffin.

Mercy Health Tiffin Hospital admitted its first patient more than 100 years ago on Sept. 16, 1913. The original building has since been demolished and replaced with a 51-bed modern facility in 2008. The cross that was once displayed prominently on top of the old building can now be spotted adorning the exterior of the new hospital's elevator shaft.

The new hospital is Seneca County's second largest employer, just behind National Machinery, LLC. More than 400 associates help keep Mercy Health Tiffin Hospital running smoothly. The hospital features a birthing center, an emergency room, an imaging center, cardiology services, inpatient and outpatient surgery, cancer care, and physical therapy.

In 2020, the medical center was named on Newsweek's 2020 list of Best Maternity Care Hospitals and was previously given a five star rating by the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services in 2019.

"Mercy has been around now in this community for a long time, but once they built the new facility out on the west side of town, things just continue to get better," Tiffin Mayor Aaron Muntz said. "In Tiffin, we're not close like the Toledo suburbs are to the hospitals that are located in the community. We have a much further hike. For us to have these vital services is paramount to the overall success, to the health and wellbeing of the Tiffin community as a whole."

"The hospital serves as the only facility of its kind in all of Seneca County," Rob Chappel, acting fire chief for the Tiffin Fire Department, said. The department worked with the hospital throughout the pandemic to develop transport protocols for sick patients.

"It really did a lot to streamline the care of those patients," Mr. Chappel said.

Hospitals included on the Fortune/IBM Watson Health 100 Top Hospitals list had better results when it came to survival rates, patient complications, healthcare associated infections, 30-day mortality and 30-day hospital-wide readmission rates, length of stay, throughput in emergency departments, inpatient expenses, profitability and ratings from patients.

In 2020, Mercy Health Tiffin Hospital saw 2,378 admissions, 61 more than in 2019. The hospital's staff delivered 728 babies, compared to 537 the previous year. The emergency room has 16,563 visits in 2020, down nearly 3,500 from 2019 and just over 3,100 surgeries were performed, down roughly 640 from the previous year.

According to IBM Watson, performance by their top 100 hospitals, when extrapolated to all Medicare inpatients, could result in more than 79,000 additional lives saved in the hospital; more than 44,000 additional patients being complication-free, more than $10.1 billion in inpatient costs saved, and more than 34,000 fewer discharged patients readmitted within 30 days.

Just a few floors away from where Ms. Wise oversees med-surg, Megan Homan, also a nurse, oversees the hospital's 14-bed emergency department. She described the past year, during the pandemic, as a huge learning experience.

"I don't know if I have another pandemic in me," she joked, adding that the system support across the board made surviving the past year possible.

"People here take pride in knowing that they're caring for their family, their friends, and their neighbors."