For the second year in a row, Waldo County General Hospital in Belfast has been recognized as one of the nation’s top rural hospitals.
The selection was made by the Leapfrog Group, which describes itself as a nonprofit national watchdog organization focused on health care safety and quality.
Leapfrog Vice President Erica Mobley says the rankings are chosen from the hospitals that fill out a voluntary survey.
“From the beginning we’re only considering the top 10% of all hospitals when looking at all of their safety and quality results that we have collected. And then from there we look at performance on some of the specific measures that we look at,” she says.
Those measure include the hospital’s technology for preventing medical errors.
Mobley says rural hospitals face unique challenges.
“We would expect different performance, not less performance, from a hospital in a rural community, but just different and so we want to be able to compare them to their peers rather than comparing them to a large academic medical center in a big city,” she says.
Last year, Leapfrog gave top ratings to 7 Maine hospitals.