St. Alexius Among 100 Top Hospitals® for Cardiovascular Care
Posted on 11/19/2008
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Thomson Reuters announced its top 100 U.S. hospitals that are setting the nation’s benchmarks for cardiovascular care on Monday, November 17, 2008. St. Alexius Medical Center was selected as a winner of the 2008 Thomson Reuters 100 Top Hospitals®: Cardiovascular Benchmarks Award.
The study- 2008 Thomson Reuters 100 Top Hospitals®: Cardiovascular Benchmarks for Success- 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 programs in the Healthcare business of Thomson Reuters.
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 benchmark hospitals demonstrate that the quality of cardiovascular care is still rising across the country,” said Janet Young, MD, senior scientist at the Thomson Reuters Center for Healthcare Improvement. “These hospitals pushed the bar to new levels, particularly in improved survival rates and reduced cost.”
Hospitals were classified into three comparison groups. St. Alexius Medical Center was included in the Community Hospitals classification.