Oak Lawn, Illinois – The Advocate Christ Medical Center Heart and Vascular Institute has earned the 2013 National Cardiovascular Data Registry (NCDR) ACTION Registry®--GWTG™ Platinum Performance Achievement Award for its commitment and success in implementing a higher standard of care in the treatment of heart attack patients.
The award signifies that the Heart and Vascular Institute has reached an aggressive goal of consistently applying standard levels of care as outlined in the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association (ACC/AHA) clinical guidelines and recommendations.
To be eligible for the Platinum Performance Achievement Award, a hospital must follow the treatment guidelines in the ACTION Registry-GWTG for at least eight consecutive quarters and meet a performance standard of 90 percent for specific performance measures. Following these treatment guidelines improves adherence to ACC/AHA clinical recommendations and monitors drug safety as well as the overall quality of care provided to both ST-elevation and non-ST-elevation heart attack patients.
“This award is truly testament to what our heart teams have achieved in enhancing the treatment and outcomes for patients who have a heart attack,” said Paul Silverman, MD, head of cardiology at Christ Medical Center. Among the most important accomplishments has been the significant reduction in time between the moment in which a heart-attack victim enters through the hospital’s emergency doors and the start of lifesaving therapy to re-open a patient’s blocked arteries and prevent further heart damage.
The federal gold standard has been to provide treatment within 90 minutes of a heart-attack patient’s arrival. Christ Medical Center oftentimes cuts that waiting time by as much as a half or more, providing intervention in the heart catheterization lab within 40 minutes or 45 minutes of a heart-attack patient’s arrival, Dr. Silverman said. This efficiency is due not only to the processes that have been put into place, but to the expertise, experience and teamwork of the medical center’s interventional cardiologists, cardiac nurses, emergency department physicians and staff, the Central Telemetry Center and others, he emphasized.
Dr. Silverman noted that the medical center’s partnership with emergency medical services providers (EMS) in surrounding communities is another key component in enhancing care for heart-attack patients. Specifically, the medical center has equipped some area ambulances with advanced,12-lead EKG equipment, which indicates whether or not a patient is experiencing a heart attack and allows paramedics to alert a receiving hospital in advance of the patient’s arrival. The campus’ Center for Pre-Hospital Care also has trained many area paramedics in the use of this heart instrumentation.
Announcement of the medical center’s Platinum Performance Achievement Award comes at the same time that the medical center achieved inclusion on U.S. News & World Report’s 2013-14 “Best Hospitals” listing of the nation’s leaders in cardiology and heart surgery.
ACTION Registry—GWTG is a partnership between the American College of Cardiology Foundation and the American Heart Association, with support from the American College of Emergency Physicians, Society of Chest Pain Centers and the Society of Hospital Medicine. ACTION Registry—GWTG empowers health care providers to treat heart attack patients consistently in line with the most current, science-based guidelines and establishes a national standard for understanding and improving the quality, safety and outcomes of care provided to patients with coronary artery disease, specifically high-risk ST-elevation and non-ST-elevation patients.
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About Advocate Christ Medical Center
Advocate Christ Medical Center is part of Advocate Health Care, which is one of the nation’s leading health care networks. A not-for-profit, 694-bed, premier teaching institution with more than 1,000 affiliated physicians, Christ Medical Center is a leader in health care and one of the major referral hospitals in the Midwest in a number of specialties, including cardiovascular services, heart and kidney transplantation, neurosciences, oncology, orthopedics and women’s health. The hospital also has one of the busiest Level I trauma centers in Illinois providing emergency care for more than 90,000 patient visits annually and is a leader in breakthrough technologies, including eICU® (electronic intensive care unit) monitoring, robotic da Vinci Surgery System® and CyberKnife® Radiosurgery. In both 2012 and 2013, the medical center was named to the Truven Health 100 Top Hospitals®, while U.S. News & World Report ranked the medical center among the nation’s leading providers for cardiology and heart surgery and for geriatric medicine and ranked it fourth overall among hospitals in the state of Illinois. The hospital is also recognized by the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC) as a Magnet Center. Magnet status represents the highest honor in the nursing profession. To obtain more information or to visit our newsroom, log on to: www.advocatehealth.com/christ