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American Heart Association Recognizes Lahey Hospital & Medical Center with Award for Stroke Patient Care

Burlington, Mass. — Lahey Hospital & Medical Center has received the Get With The Guidelines®–Stroke Gold Plus Quality Achievement Award from the American Heart Association, which recognizes the hospital’s success in implementing a higher standard of care by ensuring that stroke patients receive treatment according to nationally accepted guidelines.

 

“Lahey Hospital & Medical Center is dedicated to making care for stroke patients among the best in the country,” said Dr. Kinan Hreib, Director of Stroke Services at Lahey Hospital & Medical Center. “Being recognized by the American Heart Association’s Get With The Guidelines–Stroke program demonstrates that we are leading the way to ensure that stroke patients receive the best quality care possible.”

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The Get With The Guidelines–Stroke program helps Lahey Hospital & Medical Center’s staff develop and implement acute and secondary prevention guideline processes to improve patient care and outcomes. The program provides hospitals with a web-based patient management tool, best practice discharge protocols and standing orders, along with a robust registry and real-time benchmarking capabilities to track performance.

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The quick and efficient use of guideline procedures can improve the quality of care for stroke patients and may reduce disability and save lives.

 

“Recent studies show that patients treated in hospitals participating in the American Heart Association’s Get With The Guidelines-Stroke program receive a higher quality of care and may experience better outcomes,” said Lee H. Schwamm, M.D., chair of the Get With The Guidelines National Steering Committee and director of the TeleStroke and Acute Stroke Services at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Mass. “Lahey Hospital & Medical Center’s team is to be commended for their commitment to improving the care of their patients.”

 

Following Get With The Guidelines-Stroke treatment guidelines, patients are started on aggressive risk-reduction therapies including the use of medications such as tPA, antithrombotics and anticoagulation therapy, along with cholesterol reducing drugs and smoking cessation counseling. These are all aimed at reducing death and disability and improving the lives of stroke patients. Hospitals must adhere to these measures at a set level for a designated period of time to be eligible for the achievement awards.

 

According to the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association, stroke is one of the leading causes of death and serious, long-term disability in the United States. On average, someone suffers a stroke every 40 seconds; someone dies of a stroke every four minutes; and 795,000 people suffer a new or recurrent stroke each year.

 

About Lahey Hospital & Medical Center

Lahey Hospital & Medical Center is a 317-bed teaching hospital of Tufts University School of Medicine, and includes a comprehensive ambulatory care center in Burlington and Lahey Medical Center, Peabody along with the renowned Lahey Clinic physician group. Lahey Hospital & Medical Center is world-recognized for its superb care, innovative technology, pioneering medical treatment, and leading-edge research, providing care and services in virtually every specialty and subspecialty, from primary care to cancer diagnosis and treatment to kidney and liver transplantation. Lahey Hospital & Medical Center nurses also earned Magnet status from the American Nurses Credentialing Center, a recognition only achieved by six percent of American hospitals.

 

In 2012, Lahey Hospital & Medical Center affiliated with Beverly Hospital and all of Northeast Health System to form Lahey Health. Lahey Health is what's next in healthcare providing a full continuum of integrated health services close to where you live or work. In addition to Beverly Hospital, Lahey Health includes Lahey Clinic physician group with practices in Burlington, Peabody and other locations throughout northeastern Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire; Addison Gilbert Hospital in Gloucester, MA; Lahey Health Senior Care and Lahey Health Behavioral Services as well as more than 30 primary care physician practices and multiple outpatient and satellite specialty care facilities

 

Lahey Health offers nearly 1,000 locally-based physicians providing clinical excellence and an exceptional patient experience in adult and pediatric primary care and every medical specialty, including kidney and liver transplantation; cancer, cardiovascular and orthopedic medical and surgical care; local emergency and trauma care; urological surgery; chronic disease prevention and health management; and pediatric emergency, newborn and inpatient care provided in collaboration with Boston Children's Hospital physicians.

 

Together, we are making innovative, integrated healthcare more personal and more accessible. For more information, visit LaheyHealth.org and its member websites Lahey Hospital & Medical Center, Beverly Hospital, and Lahey Health Behavioral Services.

 

About Get With The Guidelines

Get With The Guidelines® is the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association’s hospital-based quality improvement program that empowers healthcare teams to save lives and reduce healthcare costs by helping hospitals follow evidence-based guidelines and recommendations.  For more information, visit heart.org/quality.
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