Maui Awarded American Heart Gold Quality Award

By Wendy Osher

Maui Memorial Medical Center, courtesy photo.

Maui Memorial Medical Center received national honors from the American Heart Association.

The “Get With The Guidelines – Gold Quality Achievement Award” recognizes the MMMC for its aggressive goals in treating heart failure patients.  The hospital was tasked with attaining at least 85 percent compliance with core levels of care outlined by the American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology for at least 24 months.

The award program provides hospital staff with tools in caring for heart failure patients, that have proven to be successful in preventing future hospitalizations.

The quality improvement initiative gets heart failure patients started on aggressive risk reduction therapies such as cholesterol-lowering drugs, beta-blockers, ACE inhibitors, aspirin, diuretics and anticoagulants while in the hospital. They also receive alcohol/drug use and thyroid management counseling as well as referrals for cardiac rehabilitation before being discharged.

“The goal of the American Heart Association’s Get With The Guidelines program is to help hospitals like MMMC implement appropriate evidence-based care and protocols that will reduce disability and the number of deaths in these patients, said Lee H. Schwamm, M.D., chair of the Get With The Guidelines National Steering Committee and director of the TeleStroke and Acute Stroke Services at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Mass.

“Maui Memorial Medical Center is dedicated to making our care for heart failure patients among the best in the country and implementing the American Heart Association’s Get With The Guidelines–Heart Failure program will help us accomplish this goal by making it easier for our professionals to improve the long-term outcome for these patients,” said Carol Clark, Director of Communications.

According to the American Heart Association, about 5.7 million people suffer from heart failure. Statistics also show that, each year, 670,000 new cases are diagnosed and more than 277,000 people will die of heart failure.