HCIA-Sachs developed the 100 Top Hospitals: Cardiovascular Benchmarks for Success study in 1999 to identify the nation’s top cardiology hospitals and set a standard for cardiovascular treatment throughout the country.

HCIA-Sachs first launched the 100 Top Hospitals initiative 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 100 Top Hospitals;
• establish a baseline of performance given a hospital’s clinical business and the industry’s financial limitations;
• help all hospitals reach the performance level of the 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.

If all hospitals in this study performed at the level of the Cardiovascular Benchmarks for Success:

• Deaths from cardiovascular surgery would drop drastically: mortality rates would decrease nearly 15 percent for both angioplasties and bypasses, and post-operative mortality rates would drop 18 percent.
• The death rate would drop for cardiac patients not requiring invasive procedures as well — 9 percent for heart attack patients.
• Patient complications also would decrease: infections after surgery would plummet 26 percent, and post-procedural hemorrhage would fall 21 percent.
• Lengths of stay for cardiac patients would fall by an average of half a day and costs would drop by $250 million — an average of $415,000 per hospital.