Myrtle Beach, SCGrand Strand Medical Center is pleased to announce that it ranked in the top 10 percent of 861 inpatient rehabilitation facilities (IRFs) that qualified to be ranked in the IRF database of Netsmart Technologies, Inc. (Netsmart) for cases discharged between October 2022 and September 2023.

"We are honored to be recognized as one of the best inpatient rehabilitation facilities in the country," says Stacey Howard, Chief Operating Officer of Grand Strand Health. "Our multidisciplinary team shows up to work every day with the goal of improving our patients' lives through effective rehabilitation care. This recognition validates our team's extraordinary efforts."

The rankings were determined by using Netsmart’s program evaluation model (PEM), a case-mix-adjusted and severity-adjusted tool that provides facilities with a composite performance score and percentile ranking drawn from over 80 percent of all IRFs in the country. Netsmart’s PEM Version 2 Report Card uses the indicators of efficiency and effectiveness contained in the Inpatient Rehabilitation Facility Patient Assessment Instrument (IRF-PAI), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ reporting tool for the Inpatient Rehabilitation Facility Prospective Payment System (IRF PPS) and Inpatient Rehabilitation Facility Quality Reporting Program (IRF QRP). The goal of the PEM Version 2 Report Card is to recognize high-performing facilities for their delivery of quality patient care that is effective, efficient, timely, and patient-centered.

“Grand Strand Medical Center has demonstrated their commitment to providing efficient and exceptional patient care, and we are delighted to present them with this esteemed award,” said Stephanie Stockton, senior data analyst in the Analytical Services Group at Netsmart. “As the creator and steward of the nation’s largest database for rehabilitation outcomes, UDSmr actively collaborates with industry leaders to establish and promote best practices. The PEM Report Card was created to identify and recognize top-performing facilities, and it plays a pivotal role today in elevating performance standards across the nation. We look forward to working with Grand Strand Medical Center and other facilities across the nation as we collectively strive to advance care standards throughout the IRF industry.”

This is the sixteenth year that these awards have been issued to inpatient rehabilitation facilities. The original PEM Report Card was developed by Uniform Data System for Medical Rehabilitation (UDSmr, LLC) as part of a proactive solution to the Institute of Medicine’s 2006 recommendation to Congress that every Medicare provider be reimbursed on a pay-for-performance basis. The PEM Version 2 Report Card built upon the success of the original version, replacing certain effectiveness indicators with quality measures that were similar in nature and used in measuring IRF performance in the Medicare IRF QRP. The data used for this report was based on twelve months of data drawn from both Medicare and non-Medicare patients. The results were weighted and combined into a single composite score, and each facility was assigned a percentile rank from 0 to 100 relative to the other qualifying IRF subscribers in the UDS‑PRO® database.

Learn about Grand Strand Medical Center’s Inpatient Rehabilitation Unit.