Baylor Medical Center At Garland Earns Heart Failure And Chest Pain Accreditation

Baylor Medical Center at Garland has earned Heart Failure and Chest Pain accreditations from the Society of Chest Pain Centers (SCPC). This achievement demonstrates Baylor Garland’s commitment to providing the community with advanced, comprehensive treatment for chest pain and heart failure, as well as to continual improvement in all areas of patient care.

To earn Chest Pain and Heart Failure Accreditation from the SCPC, Baylor Garland had to meet or exceed a set of criteria and undergo separate on-site reviews by teams of accreditation review specialists. The strict criteria include quality measures that improve the process of care for chest pain and heart failure patients, integration with emergency medical services (EMS), personnel competencies and training throughout the system, and community education and outreach.

“Residents of Garland and the surrounding communities should be very pleased that their hospital is receiving these awards,” says Baylor Garland Chief Nursing Officer/Chief Operating Officer Janice L. Walker, R.N., BSN, MBA-HCM. “We are extremely proud of everyone on our staff and our EMS and community partners who have worked hard to meet or exceed the criteria and earn these accreditations for Baylor Garland.”

“We are thrilled to be the first Baylor Health Care System hospital to become an Accredited Heart Failure Center and join only six other hospitals in the state and 31 nationally to have received this prestigious honor,” says Baylor Garland President Tom Trenary. “Both of these accreditations demonstrate our vision to be the best place to give and receive safe, quality, compassionate care.”

Heart Failure Accreditation
Affecting about 5 million people in the United States, heart failure is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality. Baylor Garland has been working diligently to manage the care of heart failure patients more efficiently and to improve patient outcomes.

“One of our goals in pursuing this accreditation is to reduce the 30-day readmission rate for our heart failure patients, both to improve patient care and to anticipate changing reimbursement requirements from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services,” says Ron Norris, B.S., RRT, EMT-P, Director of Radiology Services and Non-Invasive Cardiology at Baylor Garland.

Because education plays a major role in effective treatment of chronic heart failure, Baylor Garland added a dedicated nurse educator for heart failure patients and a nurse practitioner to make home visits and check medication compliance for at-risk populations. Also, working with a local long-term care facility, Winters Park Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, Baylor Garland developed treatment guidelines for resident heart failure patients to maintain their health and avoid hospitalizations.

Chest Pain Accreditation
Among other criteria, this accreditation measures “door-to-balloon” (DTB) time: the time that elapses from the moment a patient reaches the emergency department (ED) until the blocked coronary artery is reopened with balloon angioplasty in the hospital’s cardiac catheterization lab. The national benchmark DTB time, set by the American College of Cardiology, is 90 minutes.

Partnering with local EMS, Baylor Garland has implemented an innovative system called LifeNet,™ which allows faster and more detailed communication between EMS in the field and the Baylor Garland ED. Using LifeNet, EMS can transmit electrocardiograms and vital signs to the ED in real time. If there’s a question as to the patient’s cardiac status, LifeNet can e-mail the electrocardiogram image directly to the on-call cardiologist’s smartphone for evaluation.

“Once we confirm with EMS that the patient is having a heart attack, we mobilize our catheterization lab prior to the patient’s arrival, often meeting patients right at the door,” says Steven Arze, M.D., Medical Director of the Emergency Department at Baylor Garland. As a result, Baylor Garland routinely achieves successful reperfusion well below the benchmark time, with an average DTB time of 56.78 minutes.

“Receiving accreditations in Chest Pain and Heart Failure further demonstrates our efforts to continually seek the best care for our patients. Our community can rest assured that Baylor Garland is at the forefront of advances in heart and vascular care,” says Marianne England, R.N., Director of Cardiology.

Both accreditations remain in effect for three years, through 2014.

Baylor Medical Center at Garland is located at 2300 Marie Curie Boulevard, Garland, TX 75042. For more information, call (972) 487-5033 or visit BaylorHealth.com/Garland.

About Baylor Medical Center at Garland:

Baylor Medical Center at Garland is a fully accredited medical center serving the residents of Garland, Texas, and the neighboring communities of Wylie, Richardson, Rowlett, Rockwall, Sachse, Mesquite and Murphy. Baylor Garland — part of Baylor Health Care System — provides advanced medical care in a healing, supportive environment. The hospital is recognized for comprehensive services in heart and vascular care, diagnostic and interventional imaging, women’s services, pain management, wound care, neonatal intensive care, sleep medicine, digestive disease, family medicine, and physical medicine and rehabilitation.

In addition to accreditations in Heart Failure and Chest Pain, Baylor Garland was also recently named a Dallas-Fort Worth Best Regional Hospital by U.S. News and World Report due to gynecology care.

Baylor Health Care System is a faith-based supporting organization providing services to a network of acute care hospitals and related health care entities that provide patient care, medical education, research and community service. For more information, visit BaylorHealth.com or call 1.800.4BAYLOR.

About Baylor Scott & White Health
As the largest not-for-profit health system in the state of Texas, Baylor Scott & White promotes the health and well-being of every individual, family and community it serves. It is committed to making quality care more accessible, convenient and affordable through its integrated delivery network, which includes the Baylor Scott & White Health Plan, Baylor Scott & White Research Institute, the Baylor Scott & White Quality Alliance and its leading digital health platform – MyBSWHealth. Through 51 hospitals and more than 1,200 access points, including flagship academic medical centers in Dallas, Fort Worth and Temple, the system offers the full continuum of care, from primary to award-winning specialty care. Founded as a Christian ministry of healing more than a century ago, Baylor Scott & White today serves more than three million Texans. For more information, visit: BSWHealth.com