Lawrence Memorial Hospital received its highest ranking in a recently released survey measuring the quality of patient care.

A report by Press Ganey Associates Inc., a health-care industry satisfaction measurement and improvement firm, ranked LMH in the top 5 percent in overall patient satisfaction, compared to more than 800 hospitals around the country.

The score represented an improvement of 13 percent from the same period last year.

Gene Meyer, LMH’s president and CEO, said he was pleased by the report.

“Our commitment to patient satisfaction pervades every area of hospital operations. Because of our emphasis on service excellence, which has become an important part of our day-to-day activities, our performance in the eyes of those we serve has constantly improved,” he said. “This is a significant accomplishment to celebrate.”

Since 1997, the hospital has participated quarterly in the Press Ganey patient satisfaction program to measure how patients rank various aspects of their hospital stays.

Press Ganey, based in South Bend, Ind., processes nearly 8 million completed surveys annually from more than 6,000 health-care facilities.

In its first Press Ganey report in 1997, LMH ranked in the 58th percentile overall. That meant that LMH had greater patient satisfaction than 58 percent of the hospitals participating in the program.

“We felt we could do better,” Meyer said. “We were doing average. While our scores were better than half of the other hospitals, we knew we could do better.”

LMH formed a Service Excellence Steering Team in 2000. Team members researched how others had fine-tuned their customer service and developed a plan to improve customer satisfaction at the hospital.

Here are some of the highlights of how LMH ranked in the latest Press Ganey report:

• Intensive Care Unit nurses scored 100, the top score, on four questions, including: friendliness/courtesy, skill, attitude toward requests and amount of attention paid to special needs.
• Room cleanliness scores increased by 1.4 points to 85.4.
• Food quality scores increased by 2.6 points to 72.2.
• Overall cheerfulness ranked in the top 5 percent nationwide.