Thomson Reuters Names Memorial Regional Hospital One of the Nation's Top 100 Cardiovascular Hospitals

Monday, December 08 2008

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:


(Hollywood, Fla.) — Memorial Regional Hospital has been named one of the nation's 100 Top Hospitals® for cardiovascular care by the Healthcare business of Thomson Reuters. This is the first time that Memorial Regional Hospital has been recognized with this honor.

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. The 2008 winners were announced November 17 in Modern Healthcare magazine.

“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 Memorial Cardiac & Vascular Institute, a leader in cardiovascular care in South Florida, is part of Memorial Regional Hospital. It offers a full array of services dedicated to the prevention, detection and treatment of cardiovascular disease. A commitment has been made to provide care that is patient-focused, safe, compassionate, comprehensive and coordinated. The hospital’s cardiac program features a full complement of highly-skilled specialists, including clinical and interventional cardiologists, electrophysiologists, interventional radiologists, interventional neuroradiologists, cardiac and vascular surgeons, cardiac anesthesiologists, pediatric interventional cardiologists and pediatric cardiac surgeons.

“Memorial Regional Hospital’s teamwork and commitment to constantly measure, review and improve performance are characteristics required to make the top 100,” said Dr. Richard Perryman, Chief of Cardiac Surgical Services at the Memorial Cardiac & Vascular Institute.

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.

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More information on this study and other 100 Top Hospitals research is available at www.100tophospitals.com. Copies of the 100 Top Hospitals report can be purchased by calling Thomson Healthcare at (800) 568-3282 or logging on to www.100tophospitals.com.

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