Community Hospital Named in Top 100 U.S. Cardiovascular Hospitals

The Community Hospital of Munster, Indiana, was recently named as one of the Top 100 U.S. Cardiovascular Hospitals in a study published by HCIA, a Baltimore-based healthcare research company.

The Community Hospital was recognized in the HCIA study as being one of the top 100 hospitals in the country performing coronary angioplasty. The study found that Top 100 hospitals treated more difficult cases overall, not just in the cardiovascular area. Despite this, mortalities, complications and length of stays were significantly lower among the Top 100 Cardiovascular Hospitals, according to the study.

The HCIA study, based on a computerized review and analysis of more than 12 million Medicare cases, found that patients who underwent a coronary angioplasty at hospitals in the Top 100 were 50 percent less likely to experience complications that would require immediate open heart surgery. On average, the top 100 hospitals were also 20 percent less expensive than the peer group and on average did twice as many procedures as their peers.

This is the second time Community Hospital has been honored as one of the top hospitals in the country for cardiac intervention. In The Best Medicine, a book published in 1992 by Dr. Robert Arnot, Community Hospital was ranked as one of the top 107 hospitals based on actual measures of performance: volume, complication rate, hospital charges and length of stay.

"Once again, an outside study has affirmed that Community Hospital maintains one of the highest quality cardiovascular programs in this country," said Edward P. Robinson, administrator of The Community Hospital. "It is a very significant endorsement to be placed among the very best considering these rankings were based on actual outcome measures of quality and performance."

"But, perhaps more significantly for patients, these studies reveal just how important it is to give very careful consideration to choosing a hospital that has demonstrated outstanding performance in such high-risk, high-cost procedures," Robinson said. "As the HCIA study reveals, there are very dramatic patient outcomes and cost advantages to be gained by selecting top performing cardiovascular hospitals."

To identify the Top 100 Cardiovascular Hospitals, HCIA developed a set of criteria for benchmarking clinical and management performance in two categories: Open Heart, or Coronary Artery Bypass Graft Surgery (CABG), and Coronary Angioplasty, or Perctuaneous Transluminal Coronary Angioplasty (PTCA).

To qualify for the coronary angioplasty ranking, Community Hospital had to consistently demonstrate good performance across six measures of clinical quality practices, operations and financial management. The clinical criteria considered risk-adjusted mortality and complications, volume of procedures and percentage of angioplasty patients who underwent an open heart surgery during the same admission. The management criteria included severity-adjusted lengths of stay and wage- and severity-adjusted cost per patient.

Prior to being ranked, each hospital was placed in one of three peer groups: teaching hospitals with cardiovascular residency programs, teaching hospitals without cardiovascular residency programs and non-teaching hospitals, the category for which Community Hospital was placed.

Only two other hospitals in Indiana were listed in the Top 100 Cardiovascular Study, one based in Indianapolis and the other, Terre Haute. The other Indiana hospitals also made the list for their performance in cardiac intervention.

The Heart Center at Community operates the largest and most experienced cardiovascular program in Northwest Indiana, performing more open heart and cardiac interventions that any single hospital.

In the past five years, Community Hospital has invested more than $26 million to expand its program, opening the area's first digital imaging cath labs, adding new open heart surgery suites and expanding its cardiovascular care unit.

The hospital has also brought in additional expertise with the naming of Dr. Bradford Blakeman, Vice Chairman of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery at Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, Ill, as the medical director of the Heart Center at Community. Cardiovascular Surgeon Dr. Blakeman and other associates from his group, Cardiac Surgery Associates, have introduced new minimally invasive heart surgery and have brought their vast experience in heart valve repair and replacement, standard open-heart surgery, high-risk cardiac surgery and management of end stage heart failure and lung transplantation.