American Heart Association Guidelines Save Lives
FRIDAY, Oct. 9 (HealthDay News) -- Heart attack and heart failure patients are less likely to die if they're treated in hospitals that have received performance awards from the American Heart Association's Get With The Guidelines (GWTG) quality improvement program, a new study shows.
Researchers analyzed Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services data on 30-day survival for heart attack and heart failure patients treated at 3,909 hospitals, including 355 that received GWTG performance awards.
The heart failure and heart attack death rates were 11 percent and 16.1 percent, respectively, at GWTG award-winning hospitals, compared with 11.2 percent and 16.5 percent for hospitals without GWTG recognition, the researchers found.
"To put this into perspective, even though those appear to be small overall differences in survival, the percentages would lead to an additional 1,800 to 3,500 patients alive at 30 days if all hospitals could achieve the quality of the award-winning hospitals," study author Dr. Paul A. Heidenreich, a staff physician at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System in California, said in a news release from the American Heart Association.
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