Labette Health Named

'Five-Star' Hospital

in Community Value Rankings

PARSONS, Kan., July 7, 2010-- Labette Health has received a five-star ranking in an annual Community Value Index (CVI) study of U.S. hospitals conducted by Cleverley + Associates, a Columbus, Ohio-based healthcare data and consulting firm. The results were contained in the 2010 edition of the firm’s “State of the Hospital Industry” statistical report released recently.

Written by William O. Cleverley, Ph.D., a noted expert in healthcare finance, the "State of the Hospital Industry" reports selected measures of hospital financial performance and discusses the critical factors that lie behind them.

The CVI, a proprietary index created by Cleverley + Associates to offer a measure of the value that a hospital provides to its community, is composed of 10 measures that assess a hospital’s performance in four areas:

1. Financial viability and plant reinvestment

2. Hospital cost structure

3. Hospital charge structure

4. Hospital quality performance

“The topic of hospital value is increasingly being discussed. Issues of pricing and community benefit have been well-publicized, but little has been offered to measure the broad scope of value,” James Cleverley, co-author of the study, said in announcing the rankings. "Fundamentally, the CVI suggests that a hospital provides value to the community when it is financially viable, is appropriately reinvesting back into the facility, maintains a low cost structure, has reasonable charges and provides high-quality care to patients."

The rankings compare a hospital’s performance with that of similar facilities in its geographic area. Hospitals with scores in the top 20 percent are designated Five-Star facilities. While some hospitals may perform well in one or two of the CVI’s core areas, hospitals in the Five-Star group have achieved strong performance in each of the four areas, Cleverley said.

Labette Health also received a five-star ranking in the 2009 study.