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Healthcare Accreditation Colloquium Announces First Heart Failure Institute

Posted on: Wednesday, 17 September 2008, 16:51 CDT

King's Daughters Medical Center of Ashland Kentucky is the first hospital in the U.S. to achieve accreditation as a Heart Failure Institute. The announcement was made September 10 at the New Cardiovascular Horizons 9th Annual Meeting in New Orleans. The Healthcare Accreditation Colloquium of Columbus, Ohio is the accrediting body.

"Heart failure is the only major cardiovascular diagnosis that still is increasing in both incidence and prevalence," said Tony Joseph, M.D., founder, president and CEO of the Healthcare Accreditation Colloquium. "With today's interventions, more people are surviving heart attacks, but are often left with impairments in their heart function. Healthcare organizations are recognizing this growing health concern and are taking steps to more effectively manage this chronic condition. King's Daughters Medical Center is at the forefront of this initiative by becoming the first accredited Heart Failure Institute in the country."

King's Daughters met or exceeded all requirements for accreditation, which included clinical process mapping, analysis of current practices, submitting a comprehensive report, in-depth interviews and an on-site visit from surveyors.

Surveyors commended King's Daughters for its outpatient heart failure management clinic that opened in 2006. The clinic provides ongoing patient management, rapid response to complications, as well as educating patients and their families about lifestyle adjustments. As a result, there has been an 80 percent reduction in hospital admissions among the patients treated at the heart failure clinic since it opened in 2006.

Heart failure is a growing health problem in the U.S., with more than five million Americans living with the disease, and 550,000 new cases diagnosed each year. Without proper management of the condition, half of patients diagnosed with heart failure will die within five years of their diagnosis, and thousands of others suffer with progressively worsening symptoms and complications.

The Healthcare Accreditation Colloquium was founded by some of the same cardiac experts who established the Society for Chest Pain Centers. The mission of the Colloquium is to bring quality and process improvement to the care of heart failure patients at hospitals by using improvement-based accreditation. The Colloquium offers a focused, organized and systematic approach to heart failure that encompasses the entire continuum of care. The process is modeled after well-established process improvement methods used in industry.

Source: Business Wire

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