Group releases list of Valley hospitals with lowest death rates

PHOENIX - About a dozen hospitals in the Valley are among the country's top performing facilities.

If you have a choice on which hospital to visit during emergencies, the authors of a new study say it could mean the difference between life and death. 

HealthGrades, a consumer information group, released a list of hospitals with the lowest death rates among emergency room patients.

Here's some background on the study. Researchers looked at more than 7 million Medicare patient records. 

They focused on 12 of the most common conditions leading to hospitalization. This included heart attack, stroke, pneumonia, and respiratory failure.  They also took into account the impact of individual risk factors that can put some patients at greater risk of death than others. 

The report, released Tuesday, lists 263 of the country's top performing hospitals. A dozen hospitals were in the Phoenix-Metro area. 

According to the study, these hospitals had, on average, 41.52-percent lower risk‐adjusted mortality than all other hospitals across the 12 diagnoses studied.

• Banner Baywood Medical Center, Mesa, AZ
• Banner Boswell Medical Center, Sun City, AZ
• Banner Del E. Webb Medical Center, Sun City West, AZ
• Banner Desert Medical Center, Mesa, AZ
• Banner Estrella Medical Center, Phoenix, AZ
• Banner Gateway Medical Center, Gilbert, AZ
• Banner Thunderbird Medical Center, Glendale, AZ
• Chandler Regional Medical Center, Chandler, AZ
• John C. Lincoln Deer Valley Hospital, Phoenix, AZ
• Mayo Clinic Hospital, Phoenix, AZ
• Saint Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center, Phoenix, AZ

According to HealthGrades, if all hospitals performed at the level of these hospitals listed, an additional 170,856 people could have potentially survived their emergency hospitalization.

For the full list, check out this website.