From left, Marine Corps veteran Jennifer Nylander has her blood drawn by Wendy Schuster, LPN, at the Marquette VA Community Based Outpatient Clinic located at 1414 West Fair Ave. The Marquette VA Clinic is part of the Oscar G. Johnson VA Medical Center of Iron Mountain. The Oscar G. Johnson VA Medical Center received a five-star rating for patient experience from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. (Journal file photo)

IRON MOUNTAIN — The Oscar G. Johnson VA Medical Center in Iron Mountain has again received a five-star rating for patient experience in the recently released Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services results of the 2019 patient experience star ratings, according to a news release from the center.

“We are honored to be rated by the CMS at five stars for patient experience. I am very grateful to our employees and volunteers for creating an environment that fosters patient satisfaction,” Jim Rice, medical center director, said in the release. “Our people are what make the difference in these types of patient outcomes.”

The facility has been rated as a five-star quality performer every year since 2017.

The Star Rating Program is used by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services as a quality rating system to measure the experiences Medicare beneficiaries have with their health plan and health care system. Health plans are rated on a scale of one to five stars, with five being the highest.

Results were based on the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Health Care Providers and Systems scores collected by the federal administrator of the nation’s major health care programs from Jan. 1 through Dec. 31 of 2019.

Each of 3,478 hospitals are assigned a patient experience star rating.

Out of that number, 266 hospitals were rated as five-star facilities.

Eight of those were VA medical centers this year; and the Iron Mountain VAMC is one of those eight.

This is the fourth time that the facility has received this rating from CMS.

This is also the second consecutive year the facility was awarded the Veterans Health Administration Best Experience Award for Level 3 facilities by the Department of Veterans Affairs at the 2020 Veterans Patient Experience Symposium held in Washington, D.C.