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MUSC receives NRC's 1999 Consumer Choice Award

 MUSC Medical Center has received the National Research Corporation’s (NRC) 1999 Consumer Choice Award for the Charleston metropolitan statistical area.

The NRC is the nation’s leading healthcare performance measurement firm. It has bestowed this award on hospitals which consumers prefer in their individual markets. 
For 1999, the organization named 126 hospital in 101 markets. The award was termed Quality Leader in past years, but this year NRC changed the name to reflect the growing role consumer choice is playing in the market place.

NRC President and CEO Michael Hays said the company this year expanded winning criteria to reflect composite scores on multiple quality and image ratings provided by consumers in NRC’s annual Healthcare Market Guide Study. The 1999 study surveyed more than 170,000 consumers in the contiguous 48 states and the District of Columbia. Individual winners are based on consumer responses in individual Metropolitan Statistical Areas, as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau.

“Consumer choice in healthcare is among the most important debates playing out in the healthcare industry, from physicians’ offices to the halls of Congress,” Hays said. “Given this fact, it seemed proper to expand the criteria for determining winners and change the name to better reflect the fact that the awards are indeed based on choices made by individual consumers each and every day. We hope the awards provide consumers with a more valuable gauge of hospital services and an alternative to clinical report cards, which often are difficult to understand by those not directly involved in the healthcare industry.”

The 1999 Healthcare Market Guide is the nation’s largest and most comprehensive study of its kind. It reflects the views of nearly 170,000 households representing approximately 400,000 covered lives. 

Surveys are conducted in the contiguous 48 states and more than 100 market areas. The study has a margin of error of plus or minus 0.2 percent at a national level. 

Co-winners are named when scores fall within the statistical margin of error for a given market.