Penn Presbyterian Medical Center Named One of the Nation's Top Cardiovascular Hospitals by Thomson Reuters
Penn Presbyterian Medical Center is the only hospital in Philadelphia to be selected as one of the nation’s "100 Top Hospitals" for cardiovascular care by Thomson Reuters, a leading news and information company. Each year, this award for cardiovascular services objectively measures performance on key criteria at the nation’s top-performing acute-care hospitals. This is the sixth year that Penn Presbyterian has been recognized with this honor.
"This distinction recognizes Penn Presbyterian’s
consistent expertise in cardiac care, a tribute
to the entire cardiovascular teams' collaborative
medical efforts to care for our patients with
complex heart conditions," comments Michele
Volpe, Penn Presbyterian Executive Director
and Chief Executive Officer. "When compared
with national averages, Penn Presbyterian cardiac
patients have better outcomes."
Patients
come to Penn Presbyterian from down the street
and across the region – more than half of cardiac
inpatients travel from New Jersey and Delaware – seeking
Penn Presbyterian’s expertise in complex arrhythmia
management, interventional cardiology, noninvasive
cardiology and cardiac imaging, preventive cardiology,
vascular medicine and endovascular therapy, and
women’s heart health. In addition to routine
heart operations, surgeons also perform coronary
artery bypass in high-risk patients, complex
aortic surgery, heart valve repair and minimally
invasive robotic-assisted cardiac surgery.
"We are honored and proud to have been
recognized again by Thomson Reuters as a Top
100 Cardiovascular Hospital," said Harvey
Waxman, MD, chief of Cardiology at Penn
Presbyterian. "Our team
of cardiovascular specialists is dedicated to
caring for some of the most critically ill
patients in the Delaware Valley through our
unique Heart Rescue, advanced heart failure,
vascular, and complex arrhythmia programs.
It is rewarding to see that, in spite of the
caring for the most critically ill patients,
we are still able to achieve excellent clinical
outcomes."
The Thomson Reuters study identifies
the nation's top providers of cardiovascular
service using the two most recent years of
data. Thomson Reuters scored facilities in
eight key performance areas: risk-adjusted
medical mortality, risk-adjusted surgical mortality,
risk-adjusted complications, core measures
score, percentage of coronary bypass patients
with internal mammary artery use, procedure
volume, severity-adjusted average length of stay,
and wage- and severity-adjusted average cost.
The measures were calculated for three classes
of hospitals: teaching with cardiovascular residency
programs, teaching without cardiovascular residency
programs, and community.
These measures help to
produce benchmarks to improve cardiology standards
of care for hospitals across the country. The
study found that top-performing facilities consistently
outperform their peers, have higher survival
rates, lower complications indices and shorter
lengths of stay compared with the peer group
hospitals.
Among the key findings:
- Winning hospitals performed
63 percent more bypass surgeries and 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.
The 2008 "Thomson Reuters
100 Top Hospitals(R): Cardiovascular Benchmarks
for Success " study
appeared in the November 17th edition of Modern
Healthcare magazine. A complete listing of
winners and a report summary is available at
www.100tophospitals.com.
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