SPRINGFIELD, IL - Prairie Heart Institute of Illinois (PHII) is providing local hospitals in the PHII network with a new Congestive Heart Failure Toolkit that includes standardized protocols, patient teaching aids, staff training materials and methods to measure the comparative effectiveness of treatments for Congestive Heart Failure (CHF).

The CHF Toolkit was developed by physicians and clinicians at Prairie Heart Institute at St. John’s Hospital, which is nationally recognized for its pioneering work treating heart and vascular disease.

Recently released data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid found that St. John’s was the only hospital in Illinois to have a lower-than-average readmission rate for heart failure. While the national average 30-day readmissions rate for heart failure was 24.5 percent, at St. John’s Hospital the rate was 21.2 percent.

Most CHF patients present to emergency rooms outside of large urban hospitals. Nationally, a few unique programs exist to address the cost and quality of treating the CHF patient. However, traditionally nothing has been available to help those hospitals outside of urban areas rapidly identify and uniformly treat the CHF patient in a way which focuses on a quick diagnosis and quality care while minimizing length of stay and cost.

“We’ve developed a comprehensive approach to treating Congestive Heart Failure patients that involves a multidisciplinary team working together to treat patients with CHF. We want to share our successes with other hospitals because we recognize that we can improve people’s lives while at the same time making our health care system function more efficiently,” said Dr. Frank Mikell, president, Prairie Cardiovascular.

Nearly five million Americans suffer from CHF. Each year 400,000 new cases are discovered. This results in more than 900,000 annual hospitalizations for CHF at a cost to Medicare of over $3.5 billion per year to treat these admissions.

One of the reasons for this high cost is that CHF is difficult to diagnose in the emergency room and once the patient is admitted into the hospital, standardized care is often not available resulting in inefficient, costly treatment regimens and extended lengths of stay. Data measured by each hospital using the CHF Toolkit will serve as the ongoing, quantitative evidence of the program’s success.

The CHF Toolkit is the second such program developed for community hospitals by the Prairie Heart Institute of Illinois. The first was the Prairie Stat Heart Program, instituted in 2004, to rapidly treat the most serious of heart attacks.

To date, more than 650 patients that have gone through the program.

Prairie Heart Institute of Illinois (PHII) is a community-based network of hospitals that offer cardiovascular clinics staffed by Prairie Cardiovascular Consultants, a group of cardiologists. The network hospitals of PHII offer the highest level of cardiovascular care possible in their communities. When more specialized care is needed, the Prairie Heart Institute at St. John’s Hospital in Springfield is always ready to deliver that care whether emergent or elective.