Boone Hospital Center has received a five-star rating from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services for the first time since 2021 and is the only medical facility in Mid-Missouri to achieve this distinction.

It is the fifth consecutive year that the East Broadway hospital has received the highest possible rating since CMS began evaluating hospitals in 2016. Boone Hospital Center is one of only 381 hospitals in the country to receive this award in 2024 – about 100 fewer than last year.

A patient-first mentality requires keeping a constant eye on the pulse of the hospital, says Robin Blount, chief medical officer of Boone Health.

Blount attributed Boone Hospital Center’s success to daily safety centers, where she and other hospital leaders come together to hear reports on every area of ​​the facility.

“We are our own town here, everyone has their job and everyone works together to make Boone what it is,” Blount said.

Boone Health serves 25 counties outside of Boone County, and Dubois said the evaluation ensures the entire region receives the quality of care it deserves.

“Many of us travel over an hour to deliver a baby. And many of us travel nearly two hours to see a cardiologist,” said Brady Dubois, president and CEO of Boone Health. “There are actually some major gaps in care here in Missouri.”

Dubois said poor medical care in rural Missouri has forced Boone Hospital Center to take action.

“The most important thing is to make sure that every day we improve the care and treatment of our patients and make sure that we make no slip-ups, no omissions, no mistakes,” he said.

Hospital administration said the high rating this year was no surprise because Boone Health knew the data it submitted deserved a five-star rating.

“Basically, we know all the systems, structures and processes that we have in place to achieve these numbers and more. And so it’s no surprise at all to us internally,” said Shannon Kuczynski, the hospital’s chief nursing officer.

Kuczynski said that while the hospital places a strong emphasis on data, the patient experience is its top priority.

“The things we observe on a daily basis, from which we derive trends and make adjustments, are the foundation for us,” she said. “We strive for perfection, but we achieve excellence. And that is far beyond what a CMS five-star rating indicates.”

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services assigns star ratings to more than 4,600 hospitals nationwide based on 46 hospital quality measures covering mortality, safety, effectiveness and timeliness of care, readmission rates and the patient experience.

The data analyzed by CMS will be made publicly available by Boone Hospital Center.

Dubois said the CMS’s five-star rating is evidence that Boone Hospital Center is taking responsible care of its patients.

“We want to make sure people don’t go home too soon when they’re not fully healed,” Dubois said. “And people shouldn’t get anything they didn’t have before they arrived.”

Kuczynski said the hospital has a shared governance structure that supports staff-led committees that focus on issues consistent with CMS benchmarks. This is an example of how Boone excels and delivers a five-star hospital, she said.

These committees use the data collected to make informed decisions and prioritize certain aspects of patient care.

However, Kuczynski believes it is not the hospital’s committees, but Boone Health’s caring corporate culture that has contributed to the hospital’s five-star success.

“We’re not too big to allow ambiguity to arise,” she said. “We provide care with intention.”