Prairie Heart Implements "Get With The Guidelines Program"

SPRINGFIELD -- Prairie Heart Institute at St. John's Hospital announced it has received recognition from the American Heart Association as a Get With The Guidelines Coronary Artery Disease hospital. The recognition signifies that Prairie Heart Institute is participating in the American Heart Association Get with the Guidelines program. The quality improvement initiative is designed to reduce the risk of recurrent heart attacks by helping hospital staff follow proven standards and procedures while coronary patients are in their care.

Prairie Heart is dedicated to maintaining our cardiac unit as one of the best in the country. Implementing the American Heart Association's program will make it easier for our professionals to improve the long-term outcome for our cardiac patients, said Dr. Charles Lucore of Prairie Heart Institute who was instrumental in obtaining the recognition. This program will assist us in implementing appropriate standards of care and protocols that reduce the number of recurrent events and deaths in patients. Already, more than 90 percent of patients treated for a heart attack at Prairie leave the hospital with life-saving treatments, he added. Under the program, coronary patients are started on aggressive risk reduction therapies such as cholesterol-lowering drugs, aspirin, ACE inhibitors and beta-blockers in the hospital and receive smoking cessation and weight management counseling and referrals for cardiac rehabilitation before being discharged. These standards of care are outlined in the American Heart Association / American College of Cardiology secondary prevention guidelines for patients with coronary artery disease.

According to the American Heart Association, more than 450,000 people suffer recurrent heart attacks each year. Statistics also show that within six years after a heart attack, about 22 percent of men and 46 percent of women will be disabled with heart failures. Within one year of an attack, 25 percent of men and 38 percent of women will die.

Research indicates that when patients are discharged from the hospital on appropriate medications such as aspirin, beta-blockers, ACE inhibitors and lipid-lowering medicines, a patient's risk of a second event is reduced and lives are saved.

Get With The Guidelines assists in implementing a secondary prevention guideline process. The program includes quality-improvement measures such as care maps, discharge protocols, standing orders and measurement tools.

These guideline tools enable Prairie Heart Institute to improve the quality of care it provides cardiac patients, save lives and ultimately, reduce healthcare costs by lowering the recurrence of heart attacks, said Dr. Lucore. Projections have shown that if the Get With The Guidelines program was implemented nationwide, more than 80,000 lives could be saved each year.

The American Heart Association program developed with support from an unrestricted educational grant from Merck & Co., Inc., is being implemented in hospitals around the country. For more information, visit americanheart.org.