When it comes to hearts, Christ Hospital Med Center has “Golden Touch”

April 1, 2014 | Filed under: Community,County Gov,News | Posted by: admin +

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When it comes to hearts, Christ Hospital Med Center has “Golden Touch”

When it comes to heart care, Advocate Christ Medical Center has the golden touch.

4 teens shot across Englewood (Photo credit: Kevin Gebhardt)

That’s because the American Heart Association (AHA) is presenting the medical center and its Heart and Vascular Institute a Gold-Plus Quality Achievement Award for consistently implementing and meeting the core standards of care and prevention as outlined in the AHA’s Get With The Guidelines®-Heart Failure program.

Get With The Guidelines—Heart Failure is a quality improvement program that helps hospital teams follow the most up-to-date, research-based guidelines, with the intent of speeding recovery and reducing hospital readmissions for heart failure patients.

Christ Medical Center earned the Gold-Plus Award because, for a designated time period and at a pre-determined level, its heart failure team met specific quality achievement measures related to the diagnosis and treatment of heart failure patients. These measures include proper use of medications and aggressive, risk-reduction therapies, such as used of cholesterol-lowering drugs, beta-blockers, ACE inhibitors, aspirin, diuretics and anti-coagulants while patients are still in the hospital. The guidelines also require that, before leaving the hospital, patients are educated on managing their heart failure, maintaining overall health and obtaining referrals for follow-up cardiac rehabilitation.

The AHA also accorded the medical center its Target: Heart Failure Honor Roll recognition. Target: Heart Failure is an initiative that provides hospitals with educational tools, prevention programs and treatment guidelines to reduce the risk of having to re-admit heart failure patients to the hospital and help them improve the quality of their lives through better management of their chronic condition.

Christ Medical Center offers patients the resource of its nationally recognized outpatient heart-failure clinic. The availability of the clinic ensures that the heart-failure patient has the support needed for chronic disease management when making the transition from the hospital to the home. In addition to the heart-failure clinic, the medical center provides round-the-clock access to a heart-failure clinician. Patients have the

opportunity to discuss medications, diet and other issues that they may be experiencing. The heart-failure clinician assists patients and families in navigating through the management of heart failure at home.

“Christ Medical Center is dedicated to making care for our heart failure patients among the best in the country. Implementing the American Heart Association’s Get With The Guidelines—Heart Failure program helps us accomplish this goal by making it easier for our physicians and other health care professionals to improve the long-term outcomes for these patients,” said Marc Silver, MD, a noted heart failure expert and chair of the department of medicine at Christ Medical Center.

He added that Get With The Guidelines helps the Christ Medical Center team develop and implement acute and secondary prevention guideline processes. The program includes quality-improvement measures like care maps, hospital discharge protocols, and standing orders.

“The quick and efficient use of these guideline tools enables us to enhance the quality of care for our heart-failure patients, save lives and, ultimately, reduce health care costs by lowering the recurrence of heart attacks,” Dr. Silver said.

“We are pleased to recognize Advocate Christ Medical Center for its commitment to heart failure care,” said Deepak L. Bhatt, MD, MPH, national chair 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 can reduce patients’ length of stays and 30-day readmission rates and also reduce disparity gaps in care.”

Some 5.1 million people in the United States have heart failure, according to the American Heart Association. Annually, 670,000 new cases of heart failure are diagnosed, and more than 275,000 patients will die of heart failure. However, many patients can lead a full life when their condition is managed with proper medications and devices and with healthy lifestyle changes.

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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. For the last three years (2012-2014), the medical center has been named to the Truven Health 100 Top Hospitals® list. U.S. News & World Report has ranked the medical center among the nation’s leading providers for cardiology and heart surgery and for geriatric medicine and ranked it overall as being among the top hospitals in 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.