Olympic Medical Home Health is once again a Top Agency of the HomeCare Elite, a recognition of the top-performing home health agencies in the United States.

The award acknowledges the best of the home care profession.

For 11 years, the Home Care Elite has identified the top 25 percent of Medicare-certified agencies — along with the top 100 and top 500 agencies overall. Of the 2,353 “elite” agencies in 2016, just 110 of those organizations have been HomeCare Elite every year since the inception of the award in 2006.

“We are incredibly proud of the nurses, therapists and support staff that work in our Home Health division,” Eric Lewis, chief executive officer of Olympic Medical Center, said.

“They have undergone a tremendous amount of positive change including implementation of the Epic electronic health record and moving into new office space in the past couple of years. Their focus on significantly expanding access to this important service and to ensure excellent outcomes for our patients is why Home Health received this quality award for the 11th year in a row. This is really an outstanding accomplishment.”

Olympic Medical Home Health has a multi-disciplinary clinical staff that has been working on many incremental changes toward enhancing the patient experience, increasing access to home health services and attaining ever-better patient outcomes.

“Our clinical staff strives for high quality care delivery and our support staff is equally committed to excellence,” said Joan Warren, director, Olympic Medical Home Health. “Some of our improvement efforts have centered on nursing assessment classes, improving care transitions, the establishment of a preceptor program for new staff, a greater focus on clinical outcomes and the implementation of an integrated electronic health record for patient documentation.”

The HomeCare Elite ranking is developed by a leading information technology company called ABILITY Network and sponsored by DecisionHealth.

Winners are ranked by an analysis of publicly available performance measures in quality outcomes, best practice (process measure) implementation, patient experience (Home Health CAHPS), quality improvement and consistency, and financial performance.

In order to be considered, an agency must be Medicare-certified and have data for at least one outcome in Home Health Compare. Out of 9,405 agencies considered, 2,353 are recognized on the 2016 HomeCare Elite winners list overall.

The entire list of 2016 HomeCare Elite agencies may be downloaded by visiting the ABILITY Network website at abilitynetwork.com/homecare-elite.