Awards & Accreditations

To qualify for the Target: Stroke Honor Roll, hospitals must meet quality measures developed to reduce the time between the patient’s arrival at the hospital and treatment with the clot-buster tissue plasminogen activator, or tPA. If given intravenously in the first three hours after the start of stroke symptoms, tPA has been shown to significantly reduce the effects of stroke and lessen the chance of permanent disability.

To earn this award, hospitals must achieve 85 percent or higher compliance with all Get With The Guidelines®-Heart Failure Achievement Measures and 75 percent or higher compliance with four or more Get With The Guidelines®-Heart Failure Quality Measures for two or more consecutive years to improve quality of patient care and outcomes.

Get With The Guidelines-Heart Failure is a quality improvement program that helps hospital teams follow the most up-to-date, research-based standards with the goal of speeding recovery and reducing hospital readmissions for heart failure patients.

St. Joseph Heart Center has earned the American College of Cardiology’s Get with the Guidelines Platinum Performance Achievement Award for 2015. St. Joseph is one of only 319 hospitals nationwide to receive the honor.

The award recognizes St. Joseph’s commitment and success in implementing a higher standard of care for heart attack patients and signifies that it has reached an aggressive goal of treating these patients to standard levels of care as outlined by the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association clinical guidelines and recommendations.

St. Joseph Medical Center has earned full accreditation with percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) from the Society of Cardiovascular Patient Care. St. Joseph undertook a rigorous evaluation and refinement of heart care processes in order to integrate the industry’s best practices into its cardiac care services. To qualify for the PCI designation, a hospital must demonstrate its expertise and commitment to quality patient care by meeting or exceeding a wide set of stringent criteria and have an on-site evaluation from the Society of Cardiovascular Patient Care.

St. Joseph Medical Center is among only 256 hospitals nationwide to be honored for their commitment to implement higher standards of care for heart attack patients, saving lives and improving outcomes of heart attack patients in our community. The award recognizes St .Joseph’s commitment and success in implementing higher standards of care for heart attack patients and reaching an aggressive goal of treating these patients to standard levels of care as outlined by the American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association clinical guidelines and recommendations.

St. Joseph Medical Center has again earned the Get With The Guidelines®–Stroke Gold Plus Quality Achievement Award from the American Heart Association. This award recognizes St. Joseph’s commitment and success in implementing a higher standard of care by ensuring that stroke patients receive treatment according to nationally accepted guidelines.

This is the second time the Stroke Center has earned the award. To earn the award, St. Joseph achieved an 85 percent or higher adherence to all Get With The Guidelines-Stroke Quality Achievement indicators for two or more consecutive 12-month intervals.

St. Joseph Medical Center’s Radiology department has earned a three-year accreditation for computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and ultrasound from the American College of Radiology (ACR).

St. Joseph undertook an intensive evaluation process, which included rigorous peer-review conducted by board-certified physicians and medical physicists who are experts in the field to ensure the medical center complies with strict criteria in areas such as staff credentials, image quality, equipment standards and quality control. Accreditation from the ACR represents the highest level of imaging and patient safety.

The Joint Commission scored St. Joseph in the top 30 hospitals across Missouri and the nation for quality and safety.

Each quarter the Joint Commission assesses risks at accredited hospitals using a tool called the Strategic Surveillance (S3). S3 scores are determined for each hospital by reviewing core measures, past citations, MSDRGs, complications, mortality rates and patient satisfaction scores. The lower the S3 score, the better a hospital’s performance. For fourth quarter 2009, St. Joseph’s cumulative S3 score was 86, placing the Medical Center in the top 30.

St. Joseph Medical Center received certification as a Primary Stroke Center from the Joint Commission. This certification recognizes that St. Joseph’s Stroke Center follows national standards and guidelines published by the Brain Attack Coalition and the American Stroke Association to significantly improve outcomes for stroke patients. As a certified Primary Stroke Center, St. Joseph’s has demonstrated excellence for the past three years in consistently meeting National Inpatient Hospital Quality Measures.

Leapfrog Safety Grade “A” Spring 2024 – 3rd “A” in a row. St. Joseph Medical Center, a member of Prime Healthcare, earned an “A” Hospital Safety Grade from The Leapfrog Group, a patient safety ratings organization. Leapfrog assigns an “A,” “B,” “C,” “D” or “F” grade to general hospitals across the country based on over 30 measures of errors, accidents, injuries, and infections as well as the systems hospitals have in place to prevent them.