50 Top Heart Hospitals List Identifies the Facilities That are Leading the Way Nationally in Heart Health (800 hits)
Source: Thomson Reuters.
The list of Thomson Reuters 50 Top Cardiovascular Hospitals for 2012 is out! The list identifies the facilities that are leading the way nationally in heart care. The list appears exclusively in the Nov. 14 issue of Modern Healthcare and on Modernhealthcare.com. If you must have heart trouble, have it in Canton, Ohio. The two major hospitals serving this city of 70,000—337-bed Mercy Medical Center and 547-bed Aultman Hospital—offer cardiovascular services that rival any in the nation. Both appear on the Thomson Reuters 50 Top Cardiovascular Hospitals for 2012.
Both are teaching hospitals, though neither has a cardiovascular residency program. Aultman has its own health plan, AultCare, which covers more than 500,000 lives in Canton's five-county area. That factor, plus competition from top-level medical centers in Cleveland, Columbus, Ohio, and Pittsburgh—each a 90-minute drive, keeps the hospital motivated to excel, says Chris Schoelles, vice president for the Aultman Heart Center. “I don't want any patient saying, ‘I had to go to Cleveland because Aultman doesn't have this service,' ” he says. Aultman shoots for 100% of patients to receive optimal care, breaking down each process into pieces to locate areas for possible improvement, he adds. Aultman has been on the list twice before. Being an insurer as well as a provider gives the organization a strong incentive to keep its patients as healthy as possible, and Schoelles believes Aultman is well positioned to benefit from the trend toward value-based purchasing.
Mercy Medical, on the list for the fifth time, has something that Dr. Ahmed Sabe, an interventional cardiologist who is the hospital's medical director, believes is unique: a cardiac catheterization lab within the emergency room. Patients with suspected heart troubles can be evaluated and treated in one place, rather than going to the cath lab after the ER has confirmed a heart attack. Sabe says he's been able to re-establish blood flow to a patient's heart in as little as six minutes after arrival at the ER.
Sabe concedes that having a cath lab in a location where it's not in steady use is a hard sell, and he gives credit to Mercy's owners, the Sisters of Charity Health System, for putting patient welfare before strict return on investment. “This few minutes extra has been worth it for hundreds of patients,” he says. Such stellar performance on one important metric has inspired Mercy's cardiovascular team to excel on others as well, Sabe says. For example, the hospital has cross-trained all of its cardiovascular nurses to handle both critical patients and stable ones; as a result, the patient can have the same team of nurses throughout the stay and get more consistent care.
View the list of hospitals and other charts Steady improvement Cardiovascular care nationwide has gotten steadily better over the 13 years that Thomson Reuters has been analyzing Medicare data to come up with its annual rosters of the nation's top cardiovascular hospitals. Read more about the methodology used (PDF). Nonetheless, there's still room for improvement. If all hospitals achieved the same performance as the 50 top cardiovascular hospitals, Thomson Reuters projects that almost 7,700 lives and $1 billion could be saved, and 6,500 additional patients could avoid complications. ...
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