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Ashe Memorial Hospital (AMH) was listed among 100 top-performing Critical Access Hospitals as determined by iVantage Health Analytic’s latest Hospital Strength Index™ rankings.

“It is an honor for Ashe Memorial to be recognized as one of the top 100 Critical Access Hospitals,” said AMH Chief Operating Officer Joe Thore. “We are very proud of the hard work and dedication of our staff and physicians that allowed for such a significant accomplishment.”

The Top 100 Critical Access Hospitals are the nation’s best rural safety-net institutions. The Hospital Strength Index is a comprehensive scorecard that evaluates: market conditions, clinical and operational performance, and financial and qualitative outcomes.

Findings of the iVantage Health Analytics study on the nation’s Critical Access Hospitals (CAHs) shed new, multi-dimensional light on the characteristics of the Top 100 performing CAHs. The 2013 “Benchmark Performance for Critical Access Hospitals” study is a trending study of the rural hospital industry.

Key findings from the study include:

• Top 100 CAHs include 60 multi-year Top Performers with 40 new facilities joining the ranks in 2013

• Top 100 CAHs perform as well or better at the median overall than the full census of all U.S. general acute care hospital

• Top 100 CAHs are disproportionately located in the Northern half of the United States with nearly one third located in three contiguous Upper Midwest states (13 in Wisconsin; 9 in Minnesota; 9 in Iowa)

• Top 100 CAHs face the least population-based demand for future healthcare services while their Quality is near the Top Quartile when compared to all U.S. general acute care hospitals

• Top 100 CAH performance is in the Top Quartile of all U.S. general acute care hospitals in the Financial and Cost & Charge categories of the study

• Top 100 CAHs are equally divided in terms of organizational structure – 52 percent are independent; 48 percent are system-affiliated.

Small and rural hospitals play a critical role in providing efficient and effective healthcare that is on par with other larger suburban and urban counterparts. “Rural hospitals have new and difficult demands that are best managed with actionable information. The Hospital Strength Index reflects the multiple challenges of running a hospital by incorporating the measures on which the industry has worked to gain consensus and standardization,” said John Morrow, executive vice president of iVantage Health Analytics, Inc.

The Hospital Strength Index™, a national ratings and analytics program developed by iVantage Health Analytics, rates 4,400+ US general acute care hospitals, including the 1,300+ Critical Access Hospitals. The Index is based on eight performance categories measuring 56 different performance metrics, and offers hospital executives, boards of directors and communities an objective way to measure their relative performance internally and among their peers.

A complete list of the hospital by name can be found at http://www.ivantagehealth.com/ivantage-health-analytics-names-top-100-critical-access-hospitals.

A copy of the study “Benchmark Performance for Critical Access Hospitals” can be found at www.iVantageHealth.com.

Ashe Memorial has also won other accolades in recent years, Thore said. In 2006, AMH was recognized as Outstanding Rural Health Organization of the year by the National Rural Health Association

In 2012, AMH was named among the nation’s “Most Wired” Hospitals, according to the results of the 2012 Most Wired Survey and Benchmarking Study released in the July issue of Hospitals & Health Networks magazine.