Heart & Vascular Institute - Texas Medical Center

Clinical Outcomes
Named Among Nation’s 100 Top Cardiovascular Hospitals for the Second Consecutive Year

The Memorial Hermann Heart & Vascular Institute-TMC is the only Houston healthcare facility to be named one of the nation’s 100 top cardiovascular hospitals for the second consecutive year. The designation was awarded through the 2006 Solucient® 100 Top Hospitals: Cardiovascular Benchmarks for Success study. The results appeared in Modern Healthcare magazine.
 
Memorial Hermann-TMC, which houses the Institute, was one of 40 teaching hospitals with cardiovascular residency programs to be recognized. It is the primary teaching hospital of The University of Texas Medical School at Houston.

Solucient, which maintains the country’s largest healthcare database, compiles the list by objectively measuring performance on key criteria at the nation’s top acute-care hospitals. The company studies medical record information and cost data reported to Medicare for about 12 million patient discharges a year.

The study focuses on hospitals that treat a broad spectrum of cardiology patients, including patients with heart attack, congestive heart failure, coronary angioplasty and coronary artery bypass graft surgery. Solucient scored facilities on seven key performance areas: risk-adjusted medical and surgical mortality, complications, procedure volume, percentage of bypass patients for which internal mammary arteries were used, severity-adjusted average length of stay and severity-adjusted average cost.
   

The Solucient study estimated that 10,000 more heart patients nationally would survive each year and 1,100 fewer complications would occur if all of the hospitals studied provided the same quality of care as the 100 top facilities.

Benchmark Results

100 Top Cardiovascular Hospitals

The 2006 Solucient® 100 Top Hospitals: Cardiovascular Benchmarks for Success study documented significant differences between the 100 top cardiovascular hospitals and the other 662 peer institutions studied:

• Survival rates at benchmark hospitals were 14.7 percent better for heart attack patients, 25.5 percent better for congestive heart failure patients and 22 percent better for bypass and angioplasty patients.
     
  
• Benchmark hospitals reported fewer infections and less postoperative hemorrhaging.
     
  
• Average patient stay was 4.53 days in benchmark hospitals, compared to 5.08 days for others. Costs were also lower.
        
• Benchmark hospitals performed more angioplasties and bypass procedures than their peers.