St. Luke's receives award for implementing a higher standard of care for heart attack patients
November 20, 2009
St. Luke’s has received the American College of Cardiology Foundation’s NCDR ACTION Registry–GWTG Gold Performance Achievement Award for 2009 – one of only 121 hospitals nationwide to do so.
The award recognizes St. Luke’s commitment and success in implementing a higher standard of care for heart attack patients, and signifies that St. Luke’s has reached an aggressive goal of treating coronary artery disease patients with 85 percent compliance to core standard levels of care outlined by the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association clinical guidelines and recommendations.
To receive the ACTION Registry–GWTG Gold Performance Achievement Award, St. Luke’s consistently followed the treatment guidelines in ACTION Registry–GWTG for 24 consecutive months. These include aggressive use of medications like cholesterol-lowering drugs, beta-blockers, ACE inhibitors, aspirin, and anticoagulants in the hospital.
“The American College of Cardiology Foundation and the American Heart Association commend St. Luke’s for its success in implementing standards of care and protocols,” said Christopher Cannon, MD, ACTION Registry–GWTG Steering Committee Chairperson and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Associate Physician in the Cardiovascular Division at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “The full implementation of acute and secondary prevention guideline-recommended therapy is a critical step in saving the lives and improving outcomes of heart attack patients,” added Gregg C. Fonarow, MD, ACTION Registry- GWTG Steering Committee Vice- Chairperson and Director of Ahmanson-UCLA Cardiomyopathy Center.
Created by the merger of the American College of Cardiology Foundation’s NCDR ACTION Registry® and the American Heart Association’s Get With The Guidelines-CAD program, ACTION Registry–GWTG combines the best of both programs into a single, unified national registry. The new registry joins the robust data collection and quality reporting features of the ACTION Registry with the collaborative models, unique tools, and quality improvement techniques of the GWTG-CAD program. With the collective strengths of these two programs, ACTION Registry–GWTG empowers health care provider teams to consistently treat heart attack patient according to the most current, science-based guidelines; and establishes a national standard for understanding and improving the quality, safety, and outcomes of care provided for patients with coronary artery disease, specifically high-risk STEMI (ST segment elevation myocardial infarction or heart attack) and NSTEMI patients (Non-ST segment elevation myocardial infarction or heart attack).
