The Solucient 100 Top Hospitals: Cardiovascular Benchmarks for Success study was first developed in 1999 to identify the nation’s top-performing hospitals that set a standard for cardiovascular treatment throughout the country.

Solucient first launched the 100 Top Hospitals program in 1993. The goal is to identify the top hospitals in the United States based solely upon empirical findings from publicly available performance data, and in doing so:

• Acknowledge the high performance of cardiovascular clinicians and managers of the top hospitals;
• Establish a baseline of performance given a hospital’s clinical business and the industry’s financial limitations; and
• Help all hospitals reach the performance level of the Solucient 100 Top Hospitals.

Wide variations in quality and financial performance still exist in health care today. By identifying hospitals that display superior performance in the clinical management of cardiovascular disease, we offer the health care industry a direction for positive change. The Cardiovascular Benchmarks for Success study names organizations that are among best-performing hospitals for treating heart attacks and cardiovascular disease and analyzes specific procedures and conditions. Among the significant differences found between the top hospitals and their non-winning.

• When performing percutaneous transluminal coronoary angioplasty (PTCA) or coronary artery bypass surgery (CABG), the rate of post-operative infection is an average 21 percent lower among all top hospitals, and an average 34 percent lower at top community hospitals.
• Heart attack patients have a 7 percent lower risk-adjusted mortality rate at top-performing hospitals—among community hospitals, the rate is 11 percent lower.
• In a secondary finding, the study shows that the use of stent implants during PTCA increased from 63 percent in last year’s study to 79 percent this year. Stents, scaffold-like devices that shore-up the arterial wall, are clearly used as a widely accepted practice in top-performing and non-winning hospitals alike.