Maui Hospital Earns Gold Quality Award for Heart Care

Left to right: Judy Kodama, MMMC director of nursing, Dr. Andrew Rosenblum, MMMC cardiologist, Leslie Lexier, MMMC Quality Specialist, Kauwela Bisquera, American Heart Association regional director for Maui and Nick Hughey, MMMC chief business officer.

By Maui Now Staff

The Maui Memorial Medical Center has received the Get With The Guidelines – Heart Failure Gold-Plus Quality Achievement Award for its program that treats heart failure patients.

This is the sixth year that the facility has been recognized with a quality achievement award.

The program helps hospitals implement guidelines with the goal of speeding recovery, and reducing hospital re-admissions for heart failure patients.

“MMMC is dedicated to improving the quality of care for our heart failure patients, and implementing the American Heart Association’s Get With The Guidelines – Heart Failure program helps us to accomplish this goal by tracking and measuring our success in meeting internationally-respected guidelines,” said Carol Clark, director of communications in a statement.

“We are pleased to recognize Maui Memorial Medical Center for their commitment to heart failure care,” said Deepak L. Bhatt, MD, MPH, national chairman of the Get With The Guidelines steering committee in a hospital press release.

“Studies have shown that hospitals that consistently follow Get With The Guidelines quality improvement measures can reduce patients’ length of stays and 30-day readmission rates and also reduce disparity gaps in care.”

According to data compiled by the American Heart Association and cited by the hospital, about 5.1 million people suffer from heart failure.

The data indicates that each year, 670,000 new cases are diagnosed and more than 275,000 people will die of heart failure; however, many heart failure patients can lead a full life when their condition is managed with proper medications and devices and with healthy lifestyle changes, hospital administrators said.