Echocardiography Lab at South Nassau Awarded Prestigious Accreditation

Oceanside, NY, September 21, 2012 --(PR.com)-- The Intersocietal Commission for Accreditation of Echocardiography Laboratories (ICAEL) has renewed its three-year accreditation of South Nassau Communities Hospital’s Center for Cardiovascular Health in the areas of adult stress, adult transesophageal, and adult transthoracic echocardiography.

Accreditation means that South Nassau’s Center for Cardiovascular Health has undergone a thorough review of its operational and technical components by a panel of cardiovascular experts. Accreditation is granted only to those facilities that are found to be providing quality patient care, in compliance with national standards, through a comprehensive application process including a detailed case study review. ICAEL was established with the support of the American Society of Echocardiography (ASE), the American College of Cardiology (ACC) and the Society of Pediatric Echocardiography (SOPE) to provide a peer review mechanism to encourage and recognize the provision of quality echocardiographic diagnostic evaluations. Participation in the accreditation process is voluntary.

Jason Freeman, MD, FACC, director of interventional cardiology at South Nassau, said, “Accreditation is a seal of approval that indicates the communities we serve can rely on us to use technologies and services in echocardiography that are recognized as effective and relevant by medical experts in the field. Accreditation demonstrates that every day we fulfill our goal of providing standard-setting care and services in echocardiography.”

South Nassau Communities Hospital is one of just 167 hospitals nationwide to be awarded the American College of Cardiology (ACC) Foundation’s National Cardiology Data Registry (NCDR) ACTION Registry–Get With the Guidelines (GWTG) Gold Performance Achievement Award for 2011. The GWTG program is a quality-improvement program that helps hospitals provide cardiac and stroke care in accordance with the most up-to-date guidelines and recommendations. Hospitals that continually meet or exceed the nationally accepted standards, or guidelines, improve their quality patient care by turning guidelines into “lifelines”. Upon meeting specific criteria, hospitals are recognized for performance achievement if at least 85 percent of their cardiac or stroke patients are treated and discharged according to the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association’s guidelines and recommendations.