100 HCA Healthcare Hospitals Earn Healthgrades Patient Safety Excellence Award

Named among the nation’s top hospitals for exceptional, patient-centered care

HCA Healthcare, Inc. (NYSE:HCA), one of the nation’s leading healthcare providers, today announced that 100 of its hospitals have been recognized as 2025 Patient Safety Excellence Award recipients by Healthgrades for providing exceptional, patient-centered care. This annual recognition is given to the top 10% of hospitals for their commitment to delivering safe, high-quality care.

“Patient safety will always be at the forefront of our priorities,” said Dr. Michael Cuffe, executive vice president and chief clinical officer of HCA Healthcare. “I am proud of all of our hospitals and their staff, who continue to strive for clinical excellence, going above and beyond to provide high-quality, compassionate care to the patients who come through our doors.”

Recognition on this list is based solely on patient outcomes. To determine the top-performing hospitals for patient safety, Healthgrades evaluated risk-adjusted complication and mortality rates for approximately 4,500 hospitals nationwide. The annual study found that patients treated in hospitals that received the 2025 Patient Safety Excellence Award have a significantly lower chance of experiencing certain complications than patients treated at non-recipient hospitals.

Earlier this year, 49 HCA Healthcare hospitals were named on the 2025 Healthgrades America’s 250 Best Hospitals list for being within the top 5% of hospitals in the country for clinical excellence. Also based exclusively on patient outcomes, the annual designation is reserved for hospitals who demonstrate superior performance in providing care for conditions and procedures across multiple specialty lines and areas.

Across HCA Healthcare, dedicated quality teams strive to engineer patient safety into day-to-day operations across the health system. These teams are responsible for overseeing event reporting, serious event analysis, safe tables, and technologies such as barcode medication administration, among other programs. Safety initiatives are measured partly through a Culture of Safety survey, which is designed to help drive safety agendas and ensure the voices of colleagues are valued and leveraged to deliver safe, quality care.

HCA Healthcare’s Patient Safety Organization (PSO), established more than a decade ago, is dedicated to improving patient safety and the quality of healthcare delivery by partnering with HCA Healthcare facilities to build systems, refine processes and foster a culture of safety. Intentionally focusing on protecting conversations around patient safety, the PSO holds an annual, enterprise-wide “Safe Table” campaign to encourage all colleagues to share concerns and ideas related to the delivery of safe, quality care.

The organization has a long history of prioritizing and working to continually improve patient safety and has worked with prominent public and private institutions on industry research, including:

• The INSPIRE trials, two large multi-state studies conducted at 59 HCA Healthcare hospitals that identified a better way to target appropriate antibiotics for patients hospitalized with pneumonia or urinary tract infection, enabling better antibiotic stewardship in hospitals.
• The CLUSTER trial, a large multi-state study conducted at 82 HCA Healthcare hospitals that found an automated outbreak detection tool reduced the size of outbreaks by 64% in the trial period preceding the COVID-19 pandemic.
• The Swap Out trial, which found that a nasal antibiotic ointment used daily for intensive care unit (ICU) patients in only one-third of U.S. hospitals at the time, is highly effective at preventing Staphylococcus aureus infections in critically ill patients, outperforming an antiseptic solution.
• The ABATE Infection Trial, which found that an infection control technique achieved a 31% reduction in bloodstream infections and nearly a 40% reduction in antibiotic-resistant bacteria among non-ICU patients with central line catheters and lumbar drains.
• The REDUCE MRSA study, which found that using antimicrobial soap and ointment to decolonize all ICU patients reduced bloodstream infections by 44% and MRSA by 37%.

HCA Healthcare has also helped develop evidence-based perinatal protocols through a longstanding partnership with March of Dimes, including prohibiting elective delivery prior to 39 weeks to help babies have a healthy start to life. Additionally, HCA Healthcare developed the Sepsis Prediction and Optimization of Therapy (SPOT) tool, a system to help clinicians more quickly identify patients with sepsis.

About HCA Healthcare

Nashville-based HCA Healthcare is one of the nation’s leading providers of healthcare services comprising 190 hospitals and approximately 2,400 ambulatory sites of care, including surgery centers, freestanding ERs, urgent care centers, and physician clinics, in 20 states and the United Kingdom. With its founding in 1968, HCA Healthcare created a new model for hospital care in the United States, using combined resources to strengthen hospitals, deliver patient-focused care and improve the practice of medicine. HCA Healthcare has conducted a number of clinical studies, including one that demonstrated that full-term delivery is healthier than early elective delivery of babies and another that identified a clinical protocol that can reduce bloodstream infections in ICU patients by 44%. HCA Healthcare is a learning health system that uses its approximately 44 million annual patient encounters to advance science, improve patient care and save lives.

All references to “Company,” “HCA” and “HCA Healthcare” as used throughout this document refer to HCA Healthcare, Inc. and its affiliates.

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