Hillcrest Receives Get With The Guidelines-Stroke Gold Plus Quality Achievement Award

 Hillcrest Baptist Medical Center has received the Get With The Guidelines®–Stroke Gold Plus Quality Achievement Award from the American Heart Association for the second year in a row. The award recognizes Hillcrest’s commitment and success in implementing a higher standard of care by ensuring that stroke patients receive treatment according to nationally accepted guidelines.

Get With The Guidelines–Stroke helps the staff of Hillcrest 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 real-time benchmarking capabilities to track performance. 

“The quick and efficient use of guideline procedures can improve the quality of care for stroke patients, reduces disability and save lives,” said Jennifer Jenkins, RN, stroke program coordinator at Hillcrest.  “Hillcrest is dedicated to making our care for stroke patients among the best in the country and this program helps us to accomplish this goal.”

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.  

"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.

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 Hillcrest

Hillcrest Baptist Medical Center operates with a mission to personally provide quality, compassionate health care in a Christian environment enhanced by medical education and research.  Hillcrest Baptist Medical Center is jointly operated by Hillcrest Health System and Scott & White Healthcare. The System includes Hillcrest Baptist Medical Center (HBMC), a fully accredited 237-bed acute care hospital on Interstate 35, HBMC - Herring Avenue, a post-acute care campus comprised of 73 inpatient beds including the Scott & White Center for Rehabilitative Medicine and Hillcrest Family Health Center, a network of primary care clinics located in Bellmead, China Spring, Hewitt, Woodway and Waco.  HMBC is home to Waco's only Neonatal Intensive Care Unit and is the area's designated Trauma Center.  HBMC became a Primary Stroke Center certified by The Joint Commission in 2009.  Hillcrest is also the Official Healthcare Provider for Baylor University Athletics.

 

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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