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Providence Health Center Named One of The
Nation’s Top 100 Heart Hospitals

Waco, Texas—Providence Health Center was this week named one of the nation’s 100 top cardiovascular hospitals by Solucient®, an Evanston, IL-based healthcare information company, and Modern Healthcare, a leading national hospital industry publication.

The annual Solucient award objectively measures performance on key criteria at the nation’s top performing heart hospitals. This is the first time that Providence Health Center has been recognized with this honor. In 2001, Providence was recognized as a top 100 orthopedic hospital.

The 2003 Solucient 100 Top Hospitals®: Cardiovascular Benchmarks for Success study appears in the Oct. 27 edition of Modern Healthcare magazine. Solucient provides comprehensive health care information to drive business growth, manage costs, and help deliver quality care for providers, payers, employers, and pharmaceutical companies.

“This is a richly deserved honor for our cardiovascular team and reflects positively on all those who have worked so hard over the past 30 years to build our heart program,” says Kent Keahey, Providence Healthcare Network’s President and CEO.

Providence cardiovascular surgeon Dr. William Peper also comments, “The key to excellence in cardiac care is assembling the right team. Providence has always placed a high premium on putting together the right people, and the beneficiaries of this great effort are the patients themselves.”

Dr. M. Wayne Falcone, cardiologist and medical director of Providence Cardiology, says, “After 30 years of support of the cardiovascular program in our community, it is nice to see Providence get the recognition it deserves for a well-developed program.”

Providence, Waco’s first hospital, established the first cardiovascular program and performed Waco’s first open-heart surgery in 1973. Over the past 30 years, Providence has been the leader with the opening of Waco’s first Chest Pain ER in 1999, the first Congestive Heart Failure Clinic in 2001, and the first drug-eluting stent implanted in May 2003. Known as the Heart Hospital throughout Central Texas, Providence continues to pursue state-of-the-art advances in cardiac care.

Among the study’s key findings: 

·         Winning or “benchmark” heart hospitals named to the 100 Top Hospitals list provided coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) patients with internal mammary artery grafts at a rate nearly four percentage points higher than peer or “non-winning” hospitals (87.4 percent versus 83.6 percent). The IMA heart bypass technique, which has been recognized in medical studies for significantly improving survival rates and lowering complications, requires surgeons to create detours around blockages in coronary arteries by using internal mammary arteries located under the chest wall, instead of more commonly used leg veins. One research team recently referred to this method as the “gold standard.”

·         If all acute care heart hospitals performed at the same level as the nation’s top heart hospitals, survival rates for cardiovascular patients could increase by 4,000 patients each year and an additional 1,400 patients could be complication-free.

·         The mortality rate for congestive heart failure at benchmark hospitals is nearly 17 percent lower than at non-winning hospitals, while the mortality rate for acute myocardial infarction, or heart attack, at benchmark hospitals is nearly nine percent lower than at peer hospitals.

·         Top hospitals have almost 19 percent lower mortality rates for CABG or coronary balloon angioplasty surgery than peer hospitals.

·         Winning hospitals are approximately 20 percent less likely than non-winners to have complications related to post-operative infections and hemorrhage for heart patients

·         Cardiovascular Patients at winning hospitals return to everyday life faster than those at non-winning hospitals. Patients at the top heart hospitals were released a half-day earlier than patients at peer hospitals.

·         Average cardiovascular-related costs for benchmark hospitals were nearly 11 percent lower than at peer hospitals.

The fifth edition of the Solucient 100 Top Hospitals®: Cardiovascular Benchmarks for Success study analyzed acute care hospitals nationwide using detailed empirical performance data from 2001, including publicly available Medicare MEDPAR data and Medicare cost reports. The measures were calculated for three classes of hospitals with the following number of winners in each:

·         Teaching with Cardiovascular Residency Programs - 30 winners

·         Teaching without Cardiovascular Residency Programs - 40 winners

·         Community - 30 winners

Providence was one of five Texas hospitals so honored. The study scored facilities according to key measures: risk-adjusted medical mortality, risk-adjusted surgical mortality, complications, percentage of CABG patients with internal mammary artery use, procedure volume, severity-adjusted average length of stay, and wage and severity-adjusted average cost.

More information on this study and other 100 Top Hospitals research is available at www.100tophospitals.com under the “Media” tab.