San Ramon, California, October 30, 2007– San Ramon Regional Medical Center recently received four awards for its cardiac program. UnitedHealth Premium® designated San Ramon Regional Medical Center as Cardiac Specialty Centers for Interventional Cardiac and Cardiac Surgery 2007, and the American Heart Association recognized the hospital with two awards.
Cardiac Services
- Designated as UnitedHealth Premium® Interventional Cardiac Care Specialty Center, and UnitedHealth Premium® Cardiac Surgery Specialty Center
-Received two American Heart Association Annual Performance Achievement Awards
The hospital received the Get with the Guidelines Coronary Artery Disease (CAD) Annual Performance Achievement Award and the Get with the Guidelines Heart Failure Annual Achievement Award, both from the American Heart Association (AHA).
“Our hospital and staff are committed to delivering care that exceeds nationally recognized standards and ensuring that our patients can be confident they are getting high quality treatment,” said San Ramon Regional Medical Center CEO, Gary Sloan.
The UnitedHealth Premium® designated San Ramon Regional Medical Center as Three Stars and Specialty Centers for both Cardiac Surgery and Interventional Cardiac, based on the current review of the hospital’s quality data provided by the American College of Cardiology and/or Society for Thoracic Surgery.
UnitedHealth’s program is designed to identify hospitals and specialists nationwide that are leading the way in providing quality cardiac care. This program evaluates hospitals capabilities including their quality processes, adherence to evidence-based approaches, compliance with nationally recognized guidelines, and their capabilities to handle cardiac treatment through a continuum of stages. It measures hospital efficiency by looking at the aggregate cost of care at an individual patient level for the complete episode. Hospitals are invited to apply for this designation.
The quality measures in the UnitedHealth Premium® Specialty Center program support UnitedHealthcare’s efforts to empower patients/consumers to make informed healthcare decisions based on evidence-based medicine.
The American Heart Association recognizes San Ramon Regional Medical Center’s commitment and success for 12 consecutive months in implementing a higher standard of cardiac care that effectively improves treatment of patients hospitalized with coronary artery disease and heart failure.
The AHA awards signify that San Ramon Regional Medical Center has reached an aggressive goal of treating heart failure patients and coronary artery patient with 85% or higher compliance to core standard levels of care outlined by the AHA and the American College of Cardiology secondary prevention guidelines for heart failure patients.
Under the Get with the Guidelines Coronary Artery Disease and Heart Failure programs, patients are started on aggressive risk reduction therapies such as cholesterol-lowering drugs, aspirin, ACE inhibitors, and beta-blockers in the hospital, and receive smoking cessation and weight management counseling and referrals for cardiac rehabilitation before they are discharged. Heart failure patients also receive diuretics and anticoagulants in the hospital.
“The American Heart Association applauds San Ramon Regional Medical Center for its success in implementing the appropriate standards of care and protocols to reduce the number of recurrent event in coronary patients,” said Gary Ellrodt, M.D., AHA volunteer chairman for the national Get with the Guidelines. “San Ramon Regional is well above the national average in terms of implementing these life-saving treatments.”
Projections have shown that implementation of cardiovascular disease secondary prevention guidelines nationwide, as promoted by Get with the Guidelines-CAD, could result in saving more than 80,000 lives nationally each year. According to the AHA, more than 450,000 people suffer recurrent heart attacks each year. Statistics also show that within one year of an attack, 25 percent of men and 38 percent of women will die. Within six years after a heart attack, about 22 percent of men and 46 percent of women will be disabled with heart failure.
According to the AHA, about 5 million people suffer from heart failure. Statistics show the incidence of heart failure has not declined in two decades and each year more than 52,000 people die in the U.S. of heart failure.