St. Joseph Chosen One of the 100 Top Cardiovascular Hospitals in U.S. for the Eighth Year
For the eighth time – and more than any other Maryland hospital – St. Joseph Medical Center has been named one of the nation’s 100 Top Hospitals® for Cardiovascular Care by Thomson Reuters. St. Joseph Medical Center is the busiest heart center in Maryland and will dedicate the opening of its new Heart Institute – a “hospital within a hospital” - on December 8, 2008.
The annual 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.
About Thomson Reuters
The Healthcare business of Thomson Reuters produces insights, information, benchmarks and analysis that enable organizations to manage costs, improve performance and enhance the quality of healthcare. For more information, go to www.thomsonreuters.com. More information on this study and other 100 Top Hospitals research is available at www.100tophospitals.com.
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St. Joseph Medical Center is a 354-bed nonprofit, regional medical center in Towson, Md., and a member of Catholic Health Initiatives. Founded in 1864 by the Sisters of St. Francis, St. Joseph has been recognized by U.S. News & World Report as one of America’s best orthopaedic facilities and is a nationally ranked Top 100 heart hospital. For more information about St. Joseph Medical Center, visit sjmcmd.org.
