Community Hospital Earns “Get with the Guidelines-Stroke” Bronze Quality Achievement Award

Get-with-the-Guidelines-Stroke-Bronze-AwardCommunity Hospital has received the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association’s Get With The Guidelines®-Stroke Bronze Quality Achievement Award. The award recognizes Community Hospital’s commitment to ensuring that stroke patients receive the most appropriate treatment according to nationally recognized, research-based guidelines developed from scientific evidence.

To receive the Bronze Quality Achievement award, hospitals must achieve 85 percent or higher adherence to all Get With The Guidelines-Stroke achievement indicators for one calendar quarter. The indicators include the aggressive use of medications - both clot-busting and anti-clotting drugs, blood thinners and cholesterol-reducing drugs; preventive action for deep vein thrombosis and smoking cessation counseling. These quality measures 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.

“With a stroke, time lost is brain lost,” CEO Don Fesko said. “Get With The Guidelines - Stroke Bronze Performance Achievement Award helps us address the important element of time and achieve our goal of consistently providing the highest quality care. Our stroke team at Community Hospital has developed a comprehensive system for rapid diagnosis and treatment of stroke patients who are admitted through the Emergency department. This includes always being equipped to provide brain imaging scans, having board certified neurologists available to conduct patient evaluations and using clot-busting medications when appropriate.”

Community Hospital also has met specific scientific guidelines as a Primary Stroke Center featuring a comprehensive system for rapid diagnosis and treatment of stroke patients.

“We are pleased to recognize Community Hospital for their commitment to stroke care,” said Deepak L. Bhatt, MD, MPH, national chairman 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.”

For providers, Get With The Guidelines-Stroke offers quality-improvement measures, discharge protocols, standing orders and other measurement tools. Providing hospitals with resources and information that make it easier to follow treatment guidelines can help save lives and ultimately reduce overall healthcare costs by lowering readmission rates for stroke patients.

For patients, Get With The Guidelines-Stroke uses the “teachable moment,” - the time soon after a patient has had a stroke, when they are most likely to listen and follow their healthcare professionals’ guidance. Studies demonstrate that patients who are taught how to manage their risk factors while still in the hospital reduce their risk of a second stroke.

According to the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association, 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.

Community Hospital in Munster, Indiana is one of Lake County’s largest and busiest hospitals – with 458 beds, more than 600 physicians and more than 3,000 employees offering a broad range of services. Community Hospital has been a recipeint of Healthgrades’ Stroke Care Excellence Award for seven years in a row, 2009-2015.

For more information about stroke education and treatment programs available through Community Hospital in Munster, visit comhs.org.