Palisades Medical Center honored for care of heart failure and stroke

NORTH BERGEN – The American Heart Association/American Stroke Association have recognized Palisades Medical Center (PMC) in North Bergen with their 2015 Get With The Guidelines® Gold-Plus Quality Achievement Awards for the Medical Center’s treatment of heart failure and stroke patients.
Get With The Guidelines–Heart Failure helps PMC’s staff 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 a robust registry and real-time benchmarking capabilities to track performance. The quick and efficient use of guideline procedures can improve the quality of care for heart failure patients, save lives, and ultimately reduce healthcare costs by lowering the recurrence of heart attacks.
Get With The Guidelines-Stroke helps hospital teams provide the most up-to-date, research-based guidelines with the goal of speeding recovery and reducing death and disability for stroke patients. PMC earned the award by meeting specific quality achievement measures for the rapid diagnosis and treatment of stroke patients at a set level for a designated period. These measures include aggressive use of medications and risk-reduction therapies aimed at reducing death and disability and improving the lives of stroke patients.
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 277,000 people will die of heart failure. However, many heart failure patients can lead a full, enjoyable life when their condition is managed with proper medications and devices, and with healthy lifestyle changes.
According to the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association, stroke is the number four cause of death and a leading cause of adult 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.