Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, Ill. has become the first organization in the nation to achieve certification through The Joint Commission's new Disease-Specific Care Advanced Certification Program in Heart Failure.
This distinction is being awarded to hospitals that are "making exceptional efforts to foster better quality of care and outcomes for heart failure patients," The Joint Commission stated in a news release.
"We have set goals for ourselves to excel in providing care and outcomes for the patients and families who suffer with this epidemic of heart failure," said Marc A. Silver, chairman of the department of medicine and director of the Heart Failure Institute at Advocate Christ Medical Center. Attaining Joint Commission certification "helps create a matrix to support us along the way. We are most proud to be able to provide such a full spectrum of heart failure services to the community," he said.
The Joint Commission's heart failure advanced certification was developed in collaboration with the American Heart Association, which, earlier this year, presented its own distinction, a Get With the Guidelines SM - Heart Failure Gold Performance Achievement Award, to Christ Medical Center for quality performance. The gold award signifies that the medical center has reached an aggressive goal of treating heart failure patients with 85 percent or greater compliance for at least 24 months as outlined by the American Heart Association/American College of Cardiology secondary prevention guidelines for heart failure patients.
To merit certification under The Joint Commission's Advanced Certification Program in Heart Failure, a hospital or medical center must:
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Meet The Joint Commission's standards and performance measurement requirements in heart failure
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Achieve at least 85 percent compliance with the American Heart Association's Get With the Guidelines SM measures in heart failure and sustain that compliance for 90 days or more
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Collect data on Joint Commission core measures for heart failure and use this data in ongoing performance improvement activities.
Specifically, the Advanced Certification Program in Heart Failure promotes successful heart-failure management efforts, including a standard method of delivering and coordinating care, implementation of evidence-based clinical practice guidelines, a secure and timely system for sharing information across settings and providers to safeguard patient rights and privacy, comprehensive performance improvement program, and clinical practices that support patient self-management.
Advocate Christ Medical Center has a national reputation in the treatment of heart failure. For example, the medical center is one of the country's leading organizations for the implantation of left ventricular assist devices (mechanical heart-assist devices) in patients with severe heart failure and has participated in a number of major heart failure studies and trials.
Dr. Silver is a nationally recognized leader in heart failure, serving as an author of multiple guideline sets, a founding member of the Heart Failure Society of America and the editor-in-chief of Congestive Heart Failure, a leading heart failure journal.
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