ONE FOR THE HEART: Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center Receives ‘Get With The Guidelines’ Gold Plus Quality Achievement Award

Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center (PVHMC) has received the Get With The Guidelines®-Heart Failure Gold Plus Quality Achievement Award from the American Heart Association for its excellence in the treatment of patients with heart failure.
 
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 and have achieved 75 percent or higher compliance with four of nine Get With The Guidelines-Heart Failure Quality Measures to improve the quality of patient care and outcomes.
 
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.

Under Get With The Guidelines–Heart Failure, heart failure patients are started on aggressive risk reduction therapies such as cholesterol-lowering drugs, beta-blockers, ACE inhibitors, aspirin, diuretics, and anticoagulants in the hospital. They also receive alcohol/drug use and thyroid management counseling as well as referrals for cardiac rehabilitation before being discharged.

“The PVHMC team is to be commended for this commitment to improving the quality of care for their patients,” said Lee H. Schwamm, M.D., chair of the Get With The Guidelines National Steering Committee and director of the TeleStroke and Acute Stroke Services at
-more-

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. Published scientific studies are providing us with more and more evidence that Get With The Guidelines works.  Patients are getting the right care they need when they need it.  That’s resulting in improved survival.

“Pomona Valley Hospital is dedicated to being among the top hospitals nationwide in the care of heart failure patients.  In implementing the American Heart Association’s Get With The Guidelines–Heart Failure program it is helping us accomplish our goal,” said Rama Thumati, MD, Cardiologist, and Medical Director of PVHMC’s Stead Heart and Vascular Center.

Get With The Guidelines–Heart Failure helps hospital staff in developing and implementing 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 toward the goal of enhancing patient outcomes and saving lives.

This high-tech, evidence-based approach enables Pomona Valley Hospital to improve the quality of care it provides for heart failure patients, and it saves lives and ultimately, reduces healthcare costs by avoiding re-hospitalization. 
 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.

###

About Pomona Valley Medical Center Hospital
Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center is a 453-bed, acute care, nationally accredited hospital serving the greater Pomona Valley.  It is one of only 227 hospitals in the country to be named a recipient of the HealthGrades 2010/11 Outstanding Patient Experience Award.  PVHMC has also been recognized nationally as a 2011 Thompson Reuters 50 Top Cardio Vascular Hospital (nationally). For more information please visit our web site at www.pvhmc.org.

About Get With The Guidelines
Get With The Guidelines® is the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association’s hospital-based quality improvement program that empowers healthcare teams to save lives and reduce healthcare costs by helping hospitals follow evidence-based guidelines and recommendations.  For more information, visit heart.org/quality.