St. Elizabeth Health Center Earns Get With The Guidelines Gold for Heart Failure Care
Youngstown, OH (PRWEB) September 11, 2014
St. Elizabeth Health Center has received the Get With The Guidelines® — Heart Failure Gold Quality Achievement Award from the American Heart Association for the third year in a row.
St. Elizabeth Health Center earned the award by meeting stringent quality achievement measures for the diagnosis and treatment of heart failure patients at a set level for a designated period.
These measures, outlined by the American Heart Association/American College of Cardiology Foundation, include proper use of medications and aggressive risk-reduction therapies such as cholesterol-lowering drugs, beta blockers, ACE inhibitors, aspirin, diuretics and anticoagulants while patients are in the hospital. Before patients are discharged, they also receive education on managing their heart failure and overall health along with referrals for cardiac rehabilitation.
“At St. Elizabeth Health Center we are dedicated to continuously improving the quality of care we provide for our heart failure patients,” says Mariann Pacak, director of Heart and Vascular Services. “Implementing the American Heart Association’s Get With The Guidelines – Heart Failure program helps us to achieve this by tracking and measuring our success in meeting internationally respected guidelines.”
“We are pleased to recognize St. Elizabeth Health Center for its commitment to heart failure care,” remarks Deepak L. Bhatt, M.D., M.P.H., national chairman of the Get With The Guidelines steering committee and Executive Director of Interventional Cardiovascular Programs at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. “Studies have shown that hospitals that consistently follow Get With The Guidelines quality improvement measures reduce patients’ lengths of stay and 30-day readmission rates and also reduce disparity gaps in care.”
Some 5.1 million people in the United States suffer from heart failure. Each year, some 670,000 new cases are diagnosed and more than 275,000 individuals die.
If patients manage their heart failure with medications and healthy lifestyles, many live full and active lives.
Get With The Guidelines – Heart Failure is a quality improvement program that helps hospital teams provide care in compliance with the most current, research-based AHA guidelines with the goal of speeding recovery and reducing hospital readmissions for heart failure patients.
About Humility of Mary Health Partners
Humility of Mary Health Partners is an integrated health system in the Mahoning Valley, which encompasses the Youngstown/Warren metropolitan area – Mahoning, Trumbull and Columbiana counties in Ohio. It is a key market of Mercy Health (formerly Catholic Health Partners) in Cincinnati, the largest health system in Ohio and one of the largest Catholic health systems in the United States. HMHP provides a full spectrum of health care services – acute inpatient and trauma, outpatient and ambulatory, rehabilitation, behavioral, emergency and urgent care, primary care physicians in patient-centered medical homes, specialist physician care, home health, home medical equipment, long-term care and hospice care, as well as the HMHP Foundation. Major sites are St. Elizabeth Health Center, St. Joseph Health Center, St. Elizabeth Boardman Health Center, HMHP Physician Associates, HMHP Care Network, The Joanie Abdu Comprehensive Breast Care Center, HMHP Cancer Care Centers in Warren and Boardman, Howland Surgery Center, St. Elizabeth Austintown Emergency Care, St. Joseph Andover Emergency Care, HM Home Health Services, HM Durable Medical Equipment, HM Home Pharmacy Services, The Assumption Village, Humility House and Hospice of the Valley. Learn more at http://www.HMpartners.org.
About Get With the Guidelines
Get With The Guidelines® is the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association’s hospital-based quality improvement program that provides hospitals with the latest research-based guidelines. Developed with the goal of saving lives and hastening recovery, Get With The Guidelines has touched the lives of more than 4 million patients since 2001. For more information, visit heart.org/quality or heart.org/myhealthcare.