South Nassau Communities Hospital Awarded JC Gold Seal for Heart Failure Care

Oceanside, NY, February 26, 2014 --(PR.com)-- South Nassau Communities Hospital has earned the Joint Commission’s Gold Seal of Approval® for its heart failure program by demonstrating compliance with the Commission’s national standards for health care quality and safety in disease-specific care. The Gold Seal of Approval recognizes South Nassau’s dedication to continuous compliance with the Commission’s state-of-the-
art standards.

To earn the award, South Nassau underwent a rigorous on-site review by a Joint Commission expert who evaluated the hospital for compliance with standards of care specific to the needs of patients and families.

The Joint Commission’s Disease-Specific Care Certification Program is designed to evaluate clinical programs across the continuum of care. Certification requirements address three core areas: compliance with consensus-based national standards; effective use of evidence-based clinical practice guidelines to manage and optimize care; and an organized approach to performance measurement and improvement activities. The Joint Commission evaluates and accredits more than 20,000 health care organizations and programs in the United States, including more than 10,600 hospitals and home care organizations, and more than 6,600 other health care organizations that provide long-term care, behavioral health care, laboratory and ambulatory care services.

In addition to the Gold Seal of Approval, South Nassau is accredited by the Intersocietal Commission for Accreditation of Echocardiography Laboratories (ICAEL) and is a recipient of the Aetna Institute of Quality (IOQ) for interventional cardiology and rhythm disease diagnosis and treatment as well as the American College of Cardiology (ACC) Foundation’s National Cardiology Data Registry (NCDR) ACTION Registry–Get With the Guidelines (GWTG) Silver Performance Achievement Award.

South Nassau’s Center for Cardiovascular Health performs a wide range of coronary and peripheral interventional procedures. The center averages a “door-to-balloon-time” of approximately 62 minutes, which is 28 minutes faster than the national standard door-to-balloon time benchmark of 90 minutes. (Door-to-balloon time is the time measured in minutes from the moment the patient walks in the door to the point the artery in the heart is re-opened with a stent.)

Electrophysiologists at the center use advanced technologies to provide timely, accurate diagnoses and therapies to treat a range of cardiac arrhythmias (abnormal heart rhythms). Services include diagnostic studies, implantation and testing of pacemakers and cardioverter defibrillators, and radio-frequency catheter ablation for the treatment of potentially fatal irregular heartbeats.

The center’s clinical and non-invasive cardiologists specialize in trans-thoracic echocardiogram (a non-invasive, highly accurate and quick assessment of the overall health of the heart, in which a probe is placed on the chest wall of the patient to produce images of the heart); transesophageal echocardiogram (which uses a specialized probe containing an ultrasound transducer at its tip that is passed into the esophagus and is used to provide clear views of areas of the heart that would be difficult to view transthoracically); and stress echocardiogram (which involves exercising on a treadmill or stationary bicycle while the patient is monitored by technology using high-frequency sound waves that produces a graphic outline of the heart's movement, valves, and chambers).

Additional cardiac imaging services offered by the center include nuclear cardiology (which generates images of the heart at work, during exercise, and at rest) and diagnostic peripheral vascular ultrasound (noninvasive diagnostic technique used to evaluate the health of blood vessels) for patients with peripheral arterial disease.