South Nassau Communities Hospital Recognized for Providing Quality Heart Failure Care

Oceanside, NY, July 30, 2015 --(PR.com)-- South Nassau Communities Hospital has been awarded the Get With The Guidelines®–Heart Failure Silver-Plus Quality Achievement Award by the American Heart Association/American College of Cardiology Foundation.

South Nassau also was named to the association’s Target: Heart Failure Honor Roll, an initiative that provides hospitals with educational tools, prevention programs and treatment guidelines designed to reduce hospitals’ risk of readmitting heart failure patients. Hospitals are required to meet criteria that improves medication adherence, provides early follow-up care and coordination and enhances patient education. The goal is to reduce hospital readmissions and help patients improve their quality of life in managing this chronic condition.

“At South Nassau, the patients and communities we serve come first in all that we do,” said Richard J. Murphy, president and CEO. “Therefore, raising our high standards is ongoing so that we fulfill our mission to provide patient-centered, quality healthcare whenever and wherever it is needed.”

Get With The Guidelines–Heart Failure is a quality improvement program that helps hospital teams provide the most up-to-date, research-based guidelines with the goal of speeding recovery and reducing hospital readmissions for heart failure patients. Launched in 2005, numerous published studies have demonstrated the program’s success in achieving patient outcome improvements, including reductions in 30-day readmissions.

South Nassau earned the award by meeting specific quality achievement measures for the diagnosis and treatment of heart failure patients at a set level for a designated period. These measures include:

patient evaluation;
proper use of medications (including ACE inhibitors/ARBs, beta-blockers, diuretics, anticoagulants and other appropriate therapies);
and aggressive risk-reduction therapies, including patient education before patients discharged on managing heart failure and maintaining overall health, post-discharge follow-up visit and other transition interventions.

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.)

The Center is accredited by the Intersocietal Commission for Accreditation of Echocardiography Laboratories; is designated an Aetna Institute of Quality for interventional cardiology and rhythm disease diagnosis and treatment and is a recipient of the Joint Commission’s Gold Seal of Approval® for its heart failure program.