South Nassau Recognized for Providing Quality Heart Failure Care

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 Electrophysiologists at the center use advanced technologies to provide timely, accurate diagnoses and therapies to treat a range of cardiac arrhythmias (abnormal heart rhythms). Services include diagnostic studies, implantation and testing of pacemakers and cardioverter defibrillators, and radio-frequency catheter ablation for the treatment of potentially fatal irregular heartbeats.

The center’s clinical and non-invasive cardiologists specialize in trans-thoracic echocardiogram (a non-invasive, highly accurate and quick assessment of the overall health of the heart, in which a probe is placed on the chest wall of the patient to produce images of the heart); transesophageal echocardiogram (which uses a specialized probe containing an ultrasound transducer at its tip that is passed into the esophagus and is used to provide clear views of areas of the heart that would be difficult to view transthoracically); and stress echocardiogram (which involves exercising on a treadmill or stationary bicycle while the patient is monitored by technology using high-frequency sound waves that produces a graphic outline of the heart's movement, valves, and chambers).

Additional cardiac imaging services offered by the center include nuclear cardiology (which generates images of the heart at work, during exercise, and at rest) and diagnostic peripheral vascular ultrasound (noninvasive diagnostic technique used to evaluate the health of blood vessels) for patients with peripheral arterial disease.

South Nassau is the only hospital on Long Island to win four major awards for quality in recent months, including for women’s services, nursing excellence, and top rankings from U.S. News & World Report and from the Joint Commission. In addition, it is a recipient of the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association’s Get With The Guidelines®–Target: Stroke Honor Roll-Elite Quality Achievement Award.

Designated a Magnet® hospital by the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC), South Nassau® Communities Hospital is one of the region’s largest hospitals, with 455 beds, more than 900 physicians and 3,000 employees. Located in Oceanside, NY, the hospital is an acute-care, not-for-profit teaching hospital that provides state-of-the-art care in cardiac, oncologic, orthopedic, bariatric, pain management, mental health and emergency services. In addition to its extensive outpatient specialty centers, South Nassau provides emergency and elective angioplasty, and is the only hospital on Long Island with the Novalis Tx™ and Gamma Knife® radiosurgery technologies. South Nassau is a designated Stroke Center by the New York State Department of Health and Comprehensive Community Cancer Center by the American College of Surgeons and is an accredited center of the Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery Association and Quality Improvement Program. In addition, the hospital has been awarded the Joint Commission’s gold seal of approval as a Top Performer on Key Quality Measures, including heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia and surgical care; and disease-specific care for hip and joint replacement, wound care and end-stage renal disease. For more information, visit www.southnassau.org.