The Only Hospital in the South Jersey Region to Receive This Award
Cooper University Hospital has received the Get With The Guidelines® Heart Failure Gold Plus Performance Achievement Award from the American Heart Association for its excellence in the treatment of patients with heart failure for the third consecutive year.
This award is given only to hospitals that achieve 85 percent or higher adherence to all Get With The Guidelines-Heart Failure Quality Achievement indicators for two or more consecutive 12-month intervals.
Get With The Guidelines is a quality improvement initiative that provides hospital staff with tools that follow proven evidence-based guidelines and procedures in caring for heart failure patients to improve outcomes, prevent future hospitalizations, and prolong life.
“Heart failure patients are some of the most difficult to treat because of the high re-admission rates and complicated regiment that patients must adhere to in order to remain healthy,” said Fredric L. Ginsberg, MD, clinical cardiologist and Director of the Cooper Heart Failure Program. “In addition to offering state-of-the-art care for seriously-ill patients with severe heart failure, our program provides chronic disease management. The success of our program is related to the consistent use of medications and device therapies proven to be beneficial for this illness, as well as using a team approach that improves access to heart failure care for our patients.”
“The Cooper team is to be commended for this commitment to improving the quality of care for their patients,” said Lee H. Schwamm, MD, Chair of the Get With The Guidelines National Steering Committee and Director of the TeleStroke and Acute Stroke Services at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. “The goal of the American Heart Association’s Get With The Guidelines program is to help healthcare providers implement appropriate evidence-based care and protocols that will reduce disability and death and improve the quality of life for patients.”
According to the American Heart Association, about 5.7 million people suffer from heart failure. Statistics also show that, each year, 670,000 new cases are diagnosed and more than 277,000 people will die of heart failure.
“ Effective management of heart failure is one of the biggest public health problems we face in medicine today,” says Joseph E. Parrillo, MD, Director of the Cooper Heart Institute and Chief of Medicine. “We are extremely proud of the fact that our program is again being recognized for the excellence of our care.”
Get With The Guidelines–Heart Failure helps Cooper’s staff develop and implement acute and secondary prevention guideline processes. The program provides hospitals with a web-based patient management tool, decision support, robust registry, real-time benchmarking capabilities and other performance improvement methodologies with the goal of enhancing patient outcomes and saving lives.
This high-tech, evidence-based approach enables Cooper to improve the quality of care it provides heart failure patients, saves lives and ultimately, reduces healthcare costs by avoiding re-hospitalization.
For more information on Get With The Guidelines, visit www.americanheart.org/getwiththeguidelines.