Brandywine Hospital today announced that it has received five star ratings from HealthGrades, the leading healthcare ratings company.  This is the second year in a row that Brandywine Hospital has achieved this top rating in treatment in heart failure.  It also has been recognized as the best rated hospital in the Western Philadelphia area for coronary interventional procedures. 

 Brandywine Hospital’s success in the treatment of heart failure has helped the Philadelphia metropolitan statistical area achieve an improvement rate in this category of 23.76%, which is greater than the national rate of improvement of 15.03% for 2005-2007.

“Congratulations to our physicians and staff who work hard every day to make Brandywine Hospital the best choice for heart care in Chester County,” states Mark A. Benz, Chief Executive Officer.  “This recognition from HealthGrades and our clinical affiliation with the University of Pennsylvania Health System, reinforces the fact that we provide state-of-the-art, quality heart care, close to home.”

Success with interventional and heart failure begins the first seconds when a patient arrives.  Brandywine Hospital has also achieved recognition from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) for heart attack care.  JCAHO and CMS call for at least 75 percent of patients experiencing a major heart attack to receive life-saving treatment in 90 minutes or less upon arrival to the hospital.  Brandywine exceeded that goal with a door-to-balloon time – the time it takes to treat a heart attack patient from the moment when he or she arrives in the emergency room to the moment their blocked artery is open – of 72 minutes.  That is 18 minutes below benchmark.

The heart failure findings were included in the eleventh annual HealthGrades Hospital Quality in America Study, which is the most comprehensive study of its kind, analyzing more than 41 million Medicare hospitalization records from 2005 to 2007 at the nation’s approximately 5,000 non-federal hospitals.  According to the study, if all hospitals performed at the level of five-star rated hospitals, 237,420 Medicare deaths could potentially have been prevented over the three years studied. More than half of those preventable deaths were associated with four conditions: sepsis, pneumonia, heart failure and respiratory failure.

While overall death rates declined from 2005 to 2007, the nation’s best-performing hospitals were able to reduce preventable deaths at a much faster rate than poor-performing hospitals, resulting in large state, regional and hospital-to-hospital variations in the quality of patient care, the study found.

Based on the study, HealthGrades today made available its 2009 quality ratings for virtually every hospital in the country at www.healthgrades.com, a Web site designed to help individuals research and compare local healthcare providers.

On its Web site, HealthGrades offers, free to consumers, quality ratings of 27 procedures and treatments for virtually every hospital in the country. The Web site is designed so that consumers can easily compare patient outcomes at their local hospitals for procedures ranging from aortic aneurysm repair to bypass surgery. Each hospital receives a star rating based on its patient outcomes in terms of mortality or complication rates for each procedure or treatment. Hospitals with outcomes that are above average to a statistically significant degree receive a five-star rating. Hospitals with average outcomes receive a three-star rating, and hospitals with outcomes that are below average receive a one-star rating. Because no two hospitals or their patients’ risk profiles are alike, HealthGrades employs extensive risk-adjustment algorithms to ensure that it is making analogous comparisons.