Memorial Hospital of Carbondale has been named one of the nation's 100 Top Hospitals® for cardiovascular care by the Healthcare business of Thomson Reuters.
Memorial’s cardiac program, Prairie Heart Institute, is recognized in the 2008 Thomson Reuters 100 Top Hospitals®: Cardiovascular Benchmarks for Succes. The study examined the performance of 970 hospitals by analyzing clinical outcomes for patients diagnosed with heart failure and heart attacks and for those who received coronary bypass surgery and angioplasties.
“These hospitals provide enormous value to their communities because heart disease is still the nation’s number one killer. They have set the new national standard for cardiovascular disease outcomes, process of care, efficiency, and lower costs,” said Jean Chenoweth, senior vice president for performance improvement and 100 Top Hospitals program.
MHC has the only heart program recognized among the nation’s Top 100 for cardiovascular care in southern Illinois, southeast Missouri, and western Kentucky.
“It is exceedingly difficult to win this award even once, and is a point of pride for Memorial Hospital of Carbondale and the community,” said Bart Millstead, MHC administrator. “Our patients can feel comfortable that our award-winning, Top 100 cardiovascular program has adopted a team approach to heart care and is performing well against national standards. Our doctors, nurses, and hospital employees work together to constantly measure, review, and improve performance to make it a better place to be treated for heart disease,” Millstead added.
Prairie Heart’s Dr. Raed Al-Dallow concurs.
“Cardiac care teams at Memorial Hospital of Carbondale and Prairie Heart Institute have made it their goal to provide high quality patient care driven by evidence-based medicine and national guidelines. Improved patient outcomes are the fruitful result of this effort,” Al-Dallow said.
Dr. Kenneth E. Saum, head of cardiovascular and thoracic surgery at MHC, praised the team for “bringing the highest level of care and treatment of cardiovascular disease home to the people of Southern Illinois.” Saum the good news while deployed to Iraq; where he is on active duty with the Army Reserves.
The study, in its tenth year, found that the 100 Top Hospitals cardiovascular award winners, as a group, performed 63 percent more bypass surgeries and 42 percent more angioplasties than peer hospitals. This may suggest that performance of bypass surgery is increasingly performed in centers of excellence.
While the average mortality rate for cardiovascular patients is very low (3.4 percent), the mortality rate for bypass surgery was 26 percent lower in the 100 Top Hospitals cardiovascular winners. The award-winning hospitals demonstrated higher performance on the evidence-based core measures published by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and cost $1,542 less per case, on average.
The 100 Top Hospitals study focused on short-term, acute care, non-federal U.S. hospitals that treat a broad spectrum of cardiology patients. Thomson Reuters researchers analyzed 2006 and 2007 Medicare Provider Analysis and Review (MedPAR) data, 2007 Medicare cost reports, and data from other sources. They scored hospitals in key performance areas: risk-adjusted medical mortality, risk-adjusted surgical mortality, risk-adjusted complications, core measures score, percentage of coronary bypass patients with internal mammary artery use, procedure volume, severity-adjusted average length of stay, and wage- and severity-adjusted average cost.
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