Patients entering Butler Memorial Hospital have a 40 percent less chance of dying there than a comparably sized hospitals.

Dr. Tom McGill, vice president of quality and safety and an infectious disease control specialist, said the Butler Health System, which oversees the hospital, uses different values and statistics to measure the quality of care given to patients.

“But I decided the most black and white indication would be mortality. It’s a statistic no one can argue with, and we found we have a 40 percent better mortality rate than comparative hospitals in the state,” McGill said Friday.

In fact, since 2002, while patients admitted to the hospital are sicker, the mortality rate has dropped from the predicted patient outcomes, based on information about the patients’ conditions.

While the expected mortality rate for Butler Memorial patients is about three per 1,000 patients, the actual rate is closer to 1.5 deaths per 1,000.

That has occurred because McGill and the hospital’s medical staff work on multiple projects to reduce infections and improve diagnostic procedures to increase the level of care, including:

• Making sure people with community acquired pneumonia, heart attacks, heart failure and surgical patients receive appropriate care for their conditions. All of these areas have rated in the 90 percent to 100 percent levels of care.

• Reducing patient falls.

• Reducing the number of patients who have clostridium difficile, usually referred to as C. difficile or C. diff, a bacterium that causes diarrhea and more serious intestinal conditions such as colitis, sepsis and sometimes death, within 72 hours after admission to BMH.

• Reducing MRSA hospital acquired infections.

The health system has done so well in its efforts, staff members were hired this year by the Hospital Council of Western Pennsylvania to teach a two-day course on the methods used to gather this type of information. They taught at hospitals in Brookville, Bradford, Clearfield, Ellwood City, Titusville, Tyrone, Windber and Warren.

Additional courses are planned for hospitals in central Pennsylvania and in West Virginia for 2011.

McGill said the board of trustees also has charged the medical staff with pushing beyond the goals established by medical and quality of care groups.

“We’ve been doing some of these studies for years now, and when there is a goal you usually find people work to that goal and then stop,” he said.

“The board wants us to find the areas we can continue to improve in, pushing those goals further,” McGill said.

Pointing to the charts and graphs detailing the results so far, he added, “I’m really proud of all of this.”