RONALD REAGAN UCLA MEDICAL CENTER has received the Get With The Guidelines Heart Failure Gold Plus Quality Achievement Award from the American Heart Association for excellence in the treatment of patients with heart failure. The recognition signifies that UCLA has reached impressive benchmarks in the evidence-based treatment
of heart-failure patients. Get With The Guidelines is a quality-improvement initiative that provides healthcare providers with tools that follow proven evidence-based guidelines and procedures in caring for heart-failure patients.
Under Get With The Guidelines Heart Failure treatment guidelines, heart failure patients are started on aggressive mortality-reduction therapies such as beta blockers, ACE inhibitors and aldosterone antagonists in the hospital. They also receive education on heart-failure management and a transition-of-care plan before being discharged.
"Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center is dedicated to being among the top hospitals nationwide in the care of heart-failure patients by implementing evidence-based strategies that can improve long-term patient outcomes, reduce costs and avoid future hospitalizations," says Gregg C. Fonarow, M.D., Eliot Corday Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine and Science and director of the Ahmanson-UCLA Cardiomyopathy Center.
The program helps hospital staff developand implement acute and secondary prevention-guideline processes. The program provides hospitals with a web-based patient management tool, decision support, robust registry, real-time benchmarking capabilities and other performance-improvement methodologies toward the goal of enhancing patient outcomes and saving lives.
According to the American Heart Association, about 5.7-million people suffer from heart failure. Statistics also show that each year, 670,000 new cases are diagnosed and more than 292,200 people will die of heart failure.
