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What the billboards didn't say was just how fast. It took 24 minutes for Richard Silverman's doctors at Lehigh Valley Hospital to clear a 100% blockage from his heart's most vital artery. That's a third of the 90-minute goal that hospitals strive for.
"Maybe five minutes more and I'd be gone," Silverman, 63, co-owner of Pro-dent, a dental laboratory in Allentown, says his doctor told him.
Doctors at Lehigh Valley are proud of their speed. It's one reason the hospital boasts the lowest heart attack death rate in the country, 11.6%, in a new government analysis obtained by USA TODAY. Among those at the other end of the spectrum is Virginia's Danville Regional Medical Center with death rates for heart attack of 19.6% and for heart failure of 15.5%.
Until today, hospital death rates were closely
guarded secrets, discussed in board rooms but beyond the reach of
patients whose lives are on the line. That changed this morning when
USA TODAY posted on its website the government's best estimates of
heart attack, heart failure and pneumonia death rates for every U.S.
hospital for two years.
Now anyone with access to a computer can
directly compare a local hospital with the one across town to see how
it stacks up against the biggest medical institutions nationwide.
Death rates from heart attack, heart failure and pneumonia are widely viewed as yardsticks of a hospital's overall performance.
"We're in an era of change at last," says Donald
Berwick, president and CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement,
a non-profit in Cambridge, Mass., that works with hospitals to improve
care and eliminate errors.
Read full article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2008-08-20-hospital-death-rates_N.htm?se=yahoorefer