HEART PROGRAM RECOGNIZED AS AMONG BEST IN NATION 

Saint Joseph's Hospital, Marshfield, has been named by Solucient as one of the nation's top teaching hospitals for cardiovascular care for the fifth consecutive year.

The Hospital is one of five in Wisconsin to be named in the top 100 category. Saint Joseph's is the state's largest heart care program outside of Milwaukee, and has had a heart program since the 1950s. In the last year, more than 700 open-heart surgeries were performed in Marshfield.

Solucient, a health care information and research firm in Evanston, Illinois, scored facilities in eight key performance areas: risk-adjusted medical mortality, adjusted surgical mortality, risk-adjusted complications, core measures score, percentage of CABG patients with internal mammary artery use, procedure volume, severity-adjusted average length of stay, and wage- and severity-adjusted average cost.

The 2006 Solucient 100 Top Hospitals: Cardiovascular Benchmarks for Success study appears in the November 6 edition of Modern Healthcare magazine. As the nation's leading source of information products for the health care industry, Solucient provides tools and vital insights that health care managers use to improve performance for their organizations.

"We are obviously very pleased to be recognized as a top 100 cardiovascular hospital for the fifth consecutive year," said Michael Kryda, MD, Saint Joseph's Hospital Chief Executive Officer. "I think it reflects the outstanding performance of the Marshfield Clinic physicians on staff here, and of our dedicated employees. We have a commitment to continually look for ways to improve outcomes and services our patients experience, and it's an honor to be nationally recognized for that."

Some of Solucient's key findings included:

• If peer hospitals (non-winners) provided the same quality of cardiovascular care as the 100 top hospitals, survival rates could increase by more than 8,000 patients each year.
• Complications of care could also decrease in peer hospitals. Approximately 575 additional patients could be complication-free.
• The average 100 Top Hospitals Cardiovascular winner meets the recommended core measures standards for 95 percent of its heart attack (acute myocardial infarction or AMI) patients, compared with 93 percent at the average peer, or non-winning hospitals. Similar differences were seen for congestive heart failure (CHF) patients. Core measures—a set of widely accepted minimum standards of care for all patients, based on scientific evidence—are used by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO), and approved by National Quality Forum.
• Both medical and surgical cardiovascular patients experience markedly higher survival rates at winning hospitals. For example, winning hospitals had 21 percent fewer deaths than expected for coronary artery bypass graft (CAG) patients while peer hospitals had only 1 percent fewer deaths than expected.
• Winning hospitals performed up to 80 percent more percutaneous coronary interventions (PCIs) than their peers, and about 50 percent more CABGs. Previous research has shown that procedure volume is a critical factor in outcomes for cardiovascular patients.
• Benchmark hospitals are proving more efficient in treating cardiovascular patients. The average 100 Top Hospitals Cardiovascular winner discharges patients half a day earlier, at an average cost that is about 13 percent less than its peers.

More information about this study is available at www.100tophospitals.com