How Michigan's Butterworth Hospital became a five-ribbon maternity facility (2024)

Corewell Health Butterworth Hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan, delivers a kindergarten class worth of children every day. This totals about 8,000 births per year.

That volume, and the expertise and employee engagement that come with it, are part of what sets Butterworth apart from other hospitals, said Dr. Casey Parini, the hospital's division chief of women's health. The facility was awarded five ribbons—the highest honor—in Newsweek's 2024 ranking of America's Best Maternity Hospitals, indicating its status as one of the best birthing hospitals in the country.

Compiled with data intelligence platform Statista, the ranking was based on an online survey of hospital managers and medical professionals, the results of patient experience surveys and on publicly available data concerning quality metrics related to maternity care, such as the number of complications per 1,000 live births. The online survey rated leading maternity hospitals on a scale of 1 to 10 in the areas of perinatal care, operative obstetrics, patient education and counseling, accommodation and service, and nurse and midwife staffing.

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Butterworth's excellence is also driven by the experience that comes from such a large number of births.

"As the population of the United States changes, when people are having babies, and their comorbid conditions—heart conditions, chronic hypertension, excessive weight, diabetes, the infertility population—increase your risks for the pregnancy and the subsequent delivery," Parini told Newsweek. "And so when I start talking about what makes a good place, a five-ribbon kind of place, people who do enough volume to have enough exposure to all these high-risk themes and have enough capability both from a NICU [neonatal intensive care unit] perspective and a maternal fetal medicine perspective to be able to provide the best care possible."

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The Butterworth specialists who have seen it all are part of the reason patients who know they have risk factors choose to deliver their babies there, said Dr. Cheryl Wolfe, the VP and department chief of women's health. She said that the hospital offers everything from low-risk care to the highest risk in the country.

"[High-risk patients] want to deliver in a facility that's going to have neonatal [care] just right there, quickly available high-risk specialists right there," she said. "If you know at the outset that you're going to have a baby that may be having some health challenges, you want to deliver in a place that not only has these available, but there are experts and they do this all the time."

The large number of deliveries at the hospital is partly due to patients coming from surrounding areas to give birth there.

"We're taking care of patients who may not necessarily be in their home hospital. The patient walks in, the patient has a team already. We have a very strong Magnet-level nursing service," Wolfe said, referring to the Magnet Recognition Program, a designation from the American Nursing Credentialing Center that recognizes facilities for nursing excellence.

Butterworth's NICU is a Level IV facility, which means the American Academy of Pediatrics says it offers the highest level of care possible for a neonatal unit.

Butterworth's status as a maternity hospital was upgraded by Newsweek this year. Last year, the hospital received four ribbons in Newsweek's ranking. Over the past year, it has made improvements by implementing quality and safety measures around taking care of pregnant patients, particularly those with hypertension.

Asked how the hospital has improved over the past year, Parini cited the patient safety measures, particularly the hospital's postpartum hypertensive guidelines.

She said that hypertensive issues like gestational hypertension, chronic hypertension and preeclampsia have gotten much more frequent in recent years and have become "a really big issue, kind of across the board in the United States."

"We have done a whole lot of evidence-based reviews, and we have a whole pathway now to try and optimize people's medications and to safely get them out of the hospital," Parini said, "and follow up with them in order to prevent return admissions, prevent morbidity, mortality associated with hypertension."

To consistently improve, Wolfe said hospital staff stays on top of medical literature and cutting-edge technologies and techniques. She described how Butterworth looks at all its cases and asks what it could have done better.

"We know that we have more high-risk patients—more high-risk babies are being born right now," she said, "and we know that we have a lot invested in our high-risk specialists to our maternal fetal medicine docs, and we constantly strive toward continuing education with all of our physicians."

Parini added that the hospital's volume helps it improve by allowing for training, which strengthens communication.

She said volume is crucial because many complications associated with OB care can be rare. Therefore, a team who hasn't had the opportunities to "capture those not-frequent events" may not be able to handle them as well when they do occur.

"We train, and just our numbers allow us to do that," Parini said. "We've started developing simulations that we're doing more and more in the hospital to kind of get the whole teamwork thing down because we know that the majority of errors in health care [are due to] communication. The only way to fix that is frequent simulations."

Beyond the life of the newborn, Wolfe said the hospital sees opportunities to also focus on the life of the mother.

"This is the beginning of a baby's life, but we also know that we have to take care of the mother, too," she said. "We have to take care of the mother before, during and after."

At Butterworth Hospital, babies benefit from the staff's medical experience, and so does the entire family welcoming its newest member.