The American Heart Association/American Stroke Association has once again recognized the Vanderbilt Stroke Center for using scientific guidelines to provide top quality patient care.
The Stroke Center was recognized with the Get With The Guidelines Gold Plus Achievement Award for implementing quality measures designed to help hospital teams provide the most up-to-date, evidence-based guidelines with the goal of speeding recovery and reducing death and disability for stroke patients.
“We at the Vanderbilt Stroke Center are very pleased to receive this recognition, on the part of the Medical Center, again this year. I want to thank the many colleagues who have helped with this effort,” said Howard Kirshner, M.D., professor of Neurology and director of the Stroke Center.
Hospitals designated Gold Plus have reached an aggressive goal of treating stroke patients with 85 percent or higher compliance to core standard levels of care as outlined by the AHA/ASA for 12 consecutive months. In addition, those hospitals have demonstrated 75 percent compliance to seven out of ten stroke quality measures during the 12-month period.
The Stroke Center was also named to the Target: Stroke Honor Roll for meeting stroke quality measures that reduce the time between hospital arrival and treatment with tPA, the clot-busting drug. Vanderbilt achieved Elite status for meeting a door-to-needle time within 60 minutes in at least 75 percent of stroke patients treated with tPA.
“We are pleased to recognize the Vanderbilt Stroke Center for their commitment to stroke care,” said Deepak L. Bhatt, M.D., M.P.H., national chair of the Get With The Guidelines steering committee and Executive Director of Interventional Cardiovascular Programs at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
“Studies have shown that hospitals that consistently follow Get With The Guidelines quality improvement measures can reduce length of stay and 30-day readmission rates and reduce disparities in care.”
According to the AHA/ASA, stroke is the number five cause of death and a leading cause of adult disability in the United States. On average, someone suffers a stroke every 40 seconds, someone dies of a stroke every four minutes, and 795,000 people suffer a new or recurrent stroke each year.
