100 Top Hospitals

IMPACT OF STUDIES

NATIONAL AWARD

CARDIOVASCULAR AWARD

Community Impact

EVEREST AWARD

Community Impact

What does a 100 Top Hospitals CARDIOVASCULAR award mean to the community?

The 100 Top Hospitals^® Cardiovascular award recognizes hospitals that have set national clinical and management benchmarks for full-service cardiovascular programs during a single year. Analysis is limited to the more than 1,000 hospitals that have open heart units, and performance is evaluated in four key cardiovascular treatment areas for Medicare patients: congestive heart failure, acute myocardial infarction (AMI) or heart attack, percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) and coronary artery bypass graft (CABG).

Cardiovascular disease remains the number one killer in the United States. Although patient survival rates for hospital cardiovascular treatment are on the rise — now over 96 percent for all U.S. hospitals — there is still room for improvement in a number of areas. Setting national benchmarks for improving cardiovascular care raises the bar for full-service cardiovascular hospitals across the nation.

Measures used to select the 100 Top Hospitals Cardiovascular winners

The 100 Top Hospitals Cardiovascular award is not just about clinical outcomes. Rather, we use public data sets and a balanced scorecard of eight tested performance measures in an attempt to identify hospitals that:

Adhere to basic process of care standards
Demonstrate good outcomes at a reasonable cost
Are efficiently managed
Meet or exceed minimum volume requirements for cardiovascular procedures

To produce benchmarks that are valid for comparisons, study hospitals are divided into three separate classes: teaching hospitals with cardiovascular residency programs, teaching hospitals without cardiovascular residency programs and community hospitals.

Choosing a hospital for care

It's important to understand that the 100 Top Hospitals® studies were developed for use as management tools to provide hospital executives and board members with a model of financial and operational efficiency. They are not designed to provide consumers with all the information needed in the selection of a healthcare provider. Selection of a hospital is a complex decision that should be made in consultation with one's physician and family.

To understand what a 100 Top Hospitals: Cardiovascular Benchmarks award means, download the brochure A Guide to the 100 Top Hospitals Cardiovascular Award.