BYU-Idaho Radio · Madison Memorial Hospital Ranked as One of Top 100 Rural Hospitals
Madison Memorial Hospital is being recognized as one of the top rural hospitals in the country.
Two weeks ago, the Chartis Group came out with a list of the top 100 rural and community hospitals in the nation. This list is based on eight performance areas, which include inpatient market share, outpatient market share, quality, outcomes, patient perspective, cost, charge and financial efficiency.
Among the list of the best rural and community hospitals is Madison Memorial Hospital. To put its placement into perspective, there are 1,805 qualified rural and community hospitals in the country. That means Madison Memorial is in the top 5% of these facilities.
Doug McBride, the executive director for business development at Madison Memorial, said in an interview with BYU-Idaho Radio, that he attributes this success to the community.
“We have some great opportunities to provide great healthcare in this area, and we just have a great community,” he said.
Rexburg has a unique population. A large portion of the people who live in the city are college students attending BYU-Idaho. McBride said the average age of the residents in Rexburg is 23 years old, which is much different from the average age of long-term residents.
“As far as working with those two populations, they are very much different,” said McBride. “But one thing that we have in particular that is basically our signature service here is our maternity center, so we have a lot of our student population who utilizes us for those services. But we also have a close association with the people who are always here, so we have great customer loyalty here.”
This ranking comes at a time when COVID-19 has put a damper on hospitals around the country. Rexburg has notoriously been ranked as one of the highest infection rates per capita in the nation. But McBride said Madison Memorial has done well despite the challenges.
“It’s been an interesting ride, and we’ve learned a lot as we’ve gone through this process. But we feel good, we feel very fortunate about how we’ve handled things even though we’ve had a high percentage of COVID patients. We just have to cross our fingers and make sure we hold true to this to the end,” he said.
McBride also said they’ve received a lot of help from other hospitals around the state.
“We have very close communications with all the hospitals in our region, and we bounce off best ideas, best practices, and we work through the processes and improve constantly. It’s been a great thing for us,” he said.