ARTICLE TOOLS

E-mail story

Comments

Printer friendly version

iPod friendly version

Share This

Text Size: A A A A

Chattanooga: Heart, stroke associations honor Erlanger

By: Adam Crisp
(Contact)

Included in this article

Jim Brexler

Erlanger hospital’s treatment of patients with coronary artery disease won it a mention in U.S. News and World Report magazine’s America’s Best Hospitals edition, according to Jim Brexler, the hospital’s CEO.

A five-page listing of hospitals deemed high performers by the American Heart Association and the American Stroke Association is featured in the magazine, due out later this month. The listing gives Erlanger a bronze rating for its treatment of patients with coronary artery disease.

“We only submitted three months of data,” Mr. Brexler said. “That put us in a bronze-level category. We would expect to next year, when this report comes out, to have 15 months of activity to report because our good work in this area continues today.”

The hospital was the only facility in the region to receive such a classification, Mr. Brexler said Thursday at the monthly meeting of the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Hospital Authority board of trustees. The heart and stroke associations honored several hundred hospitals nationwide for strong work with stroke and heart disease patients.

The award was given based on guidelines set forth by the American Heart Association. Hospitals that met 85 percent of the standards for three consecutive months qualified for bronze status.

The Heart Association program is called “Get with the Guidelines,” and it encourages hospitals to try to get patients to quit smoking, encourage them to take aspirin regularly in some instances and take beta blockers after being discharged from the hospital, among other criteria.

“There’s a highly focused group of people working on this,” said Dr. Cy Huffman, Erlanger’s chief medical officer. “Dr. Walter Puckett is the physician leader of this effort. We have a group of highly focused and highly motivated nurses working with him and working with all of our cardiologists to make this happen.”

Also at Thursday’s meeting, Mr. Brexler reported that two Erlanger hospital foundations had increased their fundraising activity.

The T.C. Thompson’s Children’s Hospital Foundation received a $500,000 gift, the largest single-source financial gift to date, Mr. Brexler said. The gift from the Clarence E. Harris Foundation requires a match by other donors, and it will help fund a children’s surgery area, he said.

The Baroness Erlanger Foundation and the Children’s Hospital Foundation had a record year together in 2008, with about $2.4 million in funds raised, Mr. Brexler said, a 77 percent increase over the past year. That money pairs with $2.3 million in federal grants secured, he said.

“The work of those two boards has been really active,” Mr. Brexler said.

Comments