Newswise — For the third year in a row, the University of Virginia cardiology and heart surgery program has been chosen as one of the top 100 in the nation by the healthcare consulting company, Solucient, LLC. This program at the UVa Medical Center was one of only 30 heart programs in a teaching hospital with cardiovascular residency to be honored by Solucient and was the only teaching hospital with residency in the Southeast (outside of Texas) to be chosen. Teaching hospitals without cardiovascular residency and community hospitals were also studied.
"UVa and our entire community can be proud to receive this recognition from Solucient," said Dr. Lawrence Gimple, head of the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine at the UVa Health System. "Patients and their families can know that UVa is committed to the highest quality care for the entire range of cardiac problems, from chest pain to the most complex diseases."
The study by Solucient, called 100 Top Hospitals: Cardiovascular Benchmarks for Success, identifies hospitals setting benchmark levels of performance for cardiovascular services throughout the nation. The aim is to benefit all hospitals that provide cardiac care. Heart disease is the number one killer in the United States and cardiology care is one of the most common and high profile of all hospital service lines.
Some of the key findings according to Solucient are:
* If cardiovascular services in all acute-care hospitals performed at the same level as a Top 100 hospital, 10,000 additional heart patients in the U.S. could survive each year and 1,100 more patients would be free of complications.* Patients at winning hospitals were 23 percent less likely than those at non-winners to have post-operative infections and 20 percent less likely to have post-operative hemorrhage.* States with higher rates of revascularization (angioplasty or bypass surgery) for treatment of the most severe heart attacks have higher survival rates.* Winners of the Top 100 were more likely than peer hospitals to provide this revascularization (angioplasty or bypass surgery) to patients with the most severe heart attacks.* Winning hospitals perform as much as 80 percent more bypass surgeries and percutaneous coronary interventions (PCIs), including angioplasties, than their peers.* Cardiovascular patients at winning hospitals return to everyday life faster than those at non-winning hospitals.* Average cardiovascular-related costs for benchmark hospitals were nearly 15 percent lower than at peer hospitals.
Solucient analyzed almost 900 hospitals using Medicare data from 2003 and 2004. The company ranked hospitals in three different comparison groups based on their performance on seven areas of cardiac care. The company added each hospital's performance-measure ranking to come up with a total ranking for each hospital. The hospitals with the best total ranking in each comparison group were selected as Top 100 benchmarks. For more information on the Solucient study, visit http://www.100tophospitals.com.
RSS