June 21, 2007, ST. LOUIS – Thirty-eight percent of Americans who suffer a heart attack die within a year according to data from the American Heart Association. For patients, knowing which hospitals have the best outcomes could be life saving. According to new information released June 21 by the government, Barnes-Jewish Hospital is statistically one of the nation’s best at treating heart attacks and the best in Missouri.

For the first time, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is giving the public access to information comparing hospital outcomes for heart attack and heart failure. The information is available on CMS'' "Hospital Compare" website at www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov/

According to the information posted by CMS, only seventeen of 4,477 hospitals in the United States had heart attack outcomes better than the national average. Barnes-Jewish Hospital is one of those seventeen hospitals and the only one in Missouri.

"The most important factor for patients is their outcome, and this is the ultimate gauge in the effectiveness of care," says Richard Bach, MD, director of the cardiac intensive care unit at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine. "Our numbers are remarkable and I can’t begin to say how proud I am of this."

CMS analyzed 30-day mortality rates for Medicare patients hospitalized with a discharge diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction (heart attack) and congestive heart failure. To make it comparable among hospitals, data was then standardized by adjusting for differences in 27 risk factors for heart attack and 24 for heart failure looking for specific things such as a patient’s age, gender and history of stroke, diabetes and hypertension.

"The fact it is carefully risk-adjusted means the analysis takes into account how sick patients are when they are cared for at a particular hospital, which should allow for more reliable comparisons," says Dr. Bach.

Hospitals are graded either "better than the U.S. average rate," "no different than the U.S. average rate," or "worse than the U.S. average rate." In that area, Barnes-Jewish is graded better than average for heart attack and also was among the lowest 30-day mortality for heart failure among Missouri hospitals.

"We’ve always enjoyed having a low mortality rate and it’s attributable to our medication usage and our timely treatment of acute heart attack in the cardiac cath lab and the emergency department," says Nelda Martin, RN, cardiology clinical nurse specialist at Barnes-Jewish.

Allowing information previously kept private by CMS is part of a new era of transparency in medicine to offer patients information on health care quality. Other performance data have been available for over a year on Hospital Compare and also on www.barnesjewish.org.

It’s another honor for heart care services offered by Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine. In their 2006 "Best Hospitals" issue, US News & World Report ranked Barnes-Jewish and Washington University’s "Heart and Heart Surgery" program as the 10th best in the nation and in November, Barnes-Jewish received an award from Solucient as one of the 100 Top Hospitals® for cardiovascular services. Also, Barnes-Jewish recently received the American Heart Association’s Get With The Guidelines–Coronary Artery Disease (GWTG-CAD) Initial Performance Achievement Award.