Moore Regional receives Gold Performance award for cardiac care
| Date Posted: 12/15/2011
PINEHURST – FirstHealth Moore Regional Hospital has received the American College of Cardiology Foundation’s NCDR ACTION Registry—Get with the Guidelines (GWTG) Gold Performance Achievement Award, a recognition awarded to only 167 hospitals nationwide in 2011.
 |
 |
|
Matthew Harmody, M.D. |
Joseph F. Hakas Jr., M.D. |
The award recognizes Moore Regional’s commitment and success in implementing a higher standard of care for heart attack patients, and signifies that the hospital has reached an aggressive goal of treating its patients to standard levels of care as outlined by clinical guidelines and recommendations from the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association (ACC/AHA).
“This means we are providing the highest quality of care in cardiac care,” says Cindy McNeill-McDonald, vice president, Quality, FirstHealth of the Carolinas.
Matthew Harmody, M.D., medical director of FirstHealth Regional EMS, calls the award “an acknowledgement of our ability to coordinate several important groups of people in a very time-sensitive medical condition that requires our dispatch people, our EMS personnel, the staff in the Emergency Department and Cath Lab, and cardiologists to meet a very aggressive time goal.”
“People in the counties that FirstHealth EMS serves, as well as now many of the surrounding counties because of our success in treating heart attack, can take comfort in the fact that if they call 911 and are found to be having a heart attack by EMS personnel, they will be well cared for throughout the entire whole process,” Dr. Harmody says. “They will also be taken to a facility directly and avoid the process of going to an outside hospital and being transferred to Moore Regional.”
The award is something that every person involved in patient care at Moore Regional, from the 911 operator to the nurse providing discharge instructions, can be proud of, according to board certified cardiologist Joseph F. Hakas Jr., M.D.
“This award is in recognition of the very hard work of a large community of dedicated people, both inside and outside of FirstHealth, who share the goal of providing the highest quality of care to those in need,” Dr. Hakas says. “Every minute counts for those having a heart attack, and expeditious transport to the state-of-the-art Reid Heart Center facility improves their odds of survival as well as their long-term quality of life. By providing care driven by the ACC/AHA guidelines, yet individualized for the patient, we can provide a quality of care as high as any center in the world.”
To achieve the Gold Performance Award, Moore Regional consistently followed the treatment guidelines in ACTION Registry-GWTG for eight consecutive quarters and met a performance standard of 85 percent for specific performance measures. Following these treatment guidelines improves adherence to ACC/AHA Clinical Guideline recommendations and monitors drug safety and the overall quality of care provided to ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) and non-ST-elevation myocardial infarction patients (NSTEMI).
Data collected for the ACTION Registry is also used in the RACE project that measures door-to-door balloon angioplasty times for STEMI patients. A team of Moore Regional cardiologists and surgeons meets monthly with McNeill-McDonald to evaluate the data for ways to improve the delivery of cardiac care.
In addition, emergency services physicians lead FirstHealth’s RACE (Reperfusion of Acute MI in Carolina Emergency Departments) team to help expedite heart-care processes.
ACTION Registry-GWTG is a partnership between the American College of Cardiology Foundation and the American Heart Association with partnership support from the American College of Emergency Physicians, Society of Chest Pain Centers and the Society of Hospital Medicine. The mission of the NCDR (National Cardiovascular Data Registry) is to improve the quality of cardiovascular patient care by providing information, knowledge and tools; implementing quality initiatives; and supporting research that improves patient care and outcomes.
