Hospital Recognized in Top Five Percent of Hospitals Evaluated

(New Brunswick, New Jersey) – Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital (RWJUH) today announced that it has achieved the 2023 Bariatric Surgery Excellence Award™ from Healthgrades, the leading marketplace connecting doctors and patients, for the fifth consecutive year. Healthgrades Specialty Excellence Awards recognize the top 10 percent of hospitals across the country based on superior patient outcomes. The hospital also received a five-star rating in Overall Bariatric Surgery for the fifth year in a row.

This achievement reflects the program’s outstanding clinical outcomes for Bariatric Surgery and distinguishes RWJUH among the top five percent U.S. hospitals for Bariatric Surgery.

“This award affirms our Bariatric Surgery Program’s dedication to providing the highest levels of bariatric care as a pathway to health and a better quality of life,” said Bill Arnold, President and Chief Executive Officer of RWJUH. “We are proud to offer patients a broad range of weight loss and bariatric surgery options, including for those patients who are considered high-risk, so that they can qualify for interventions such as organ transplantation, cardiac surgery, fertility treatments, and more.”

“We’re pleased to earn this distinction from Healthgrades which is testament to our program’s commitment to sustained achievement regarding quality and patient safety,” said Ragui Sadek, MD, Director of Bariatric Surgery at RWJUH and Clinical Assistant Professor of Surgery at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. “Our team’s level of expertise allows us to offer patients access to the most sophisticated laparoscopic procedures and surgical techniques that, combined with lifestyle changes, will return them to active, healthy lives.”

The Bariatric Surgery Center at RWJUH offers a comprehensive medical and surgical program for both adults and adolescents dedicated to making a lifestyle change. The RWJUH comprehensive bariatric surgery program not only includes surgical options, but provides metabolic medicine and addresses individuals’ weight loss goals with medical and nutritional therapy.

In addition to this Healthgrades award, RWJUH has been designated as a Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery Accreditation and Quality Improvement Program (MBSAQIP) by the American Society of Bariatric and Metabolic Surgery.

RWJUH also has earned The Joint Commission’s Gold Seal of Approval® for its Bariatric Surgery Program by demonstrating compliance with The Joint Commission’s national standards for health care quality and safety in disease-specific care. The certification award recognizes RWJUH’s dedication to continuous compliance with The Joint Commission’s state-of-the-art standards. RWJUH is one of only seven programs in the U.S. to achieve this certification.

Healthgrades evaluated patient mortality and complication rates for 31 of the most common conditions and procedures at nearly 4,500 hospitals across the country to identify the top-performing hospitals for specialty care. This year’s analysis revealed significant variation in patient outcomes between hospitals with a 2023 Healthgrades Specialty Excellence Award and hospitals that did not receive the award. Additionally, from 2018-2020, patients treated in hospitals receiving the Bariatric Surgery Excellence Award, have, on average, a 61.9% lower risk of experiencing a complication while in the hospital than if they were treated in hospitals that did not receive the Bariatric Surgery Excellence Award.*

“We commend RWJ University Hospital for their ongoing commitment to providing high-quality care to patients undergoing Bariatric Surgery,” said Brad Bowman, MD, Chief Medical Officer and Head of Data Science at Healthgrades. “Consumers can feel confident that recipients of the 2023 Bariatric Surgery Excellence Award have demonstrated their ability to deliver consistently exceptional outcomes.”

Consumers can visit Healthgrades.com to learn more about how Healthgrades measures hospital quality and access a patient-friendly overview of the complete methodology here.

*For appendectomy and bariatric surgery, Healthgrades used inpatient data from 16 states that provide all-payer data for years 2019 through 2021. Click here to view the complete 2023 Specialty Excellence Awards and Ratings Methodology.

About Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital
Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital (RWJUH), a 614-bed RWJBarnabas Health Facility, is New Jersey’s largest academic medical center through its deep partnership with Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. RWJUH is the flagship Cancer Hospital of Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey. Its other Centers of Excellence include cardiovascular care from minimally invasive heart surgery to transplantation, cancer care, stroke care, neuroscience, orthopedics, bariatric surgery and women’s and children’s care including The Bristol-Myers Squibb Children’s Hospital at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital (www.bmsch.org). A Level 1 Trauma Center and the first designated Pediatric Trauma Center in the state, RWJUH’s New Brunswick campus serves as a national resource in its ground-breaking approaches to emergency preparedness. Learn more at: www.rwjbh.org/newbrunswick

Contact: Peter Haigney
RWJUH Public Relations
(732) 937-8568