ANN ARBOR, Mich. – St. Joseph Mercy Hospital is the only hospital in the Ann Arbor area that has been named one of the nation's 100 Top Hospitals® for cardiovascular care by Thomson Reuters. This is the fourth year St. Joseph Mercy Hospital has been recognized with this honor.

The annual study — 2008 Thomson Reuters 100 Top Hospitals®: Cardiovascular Benchmarks for Success — examined the performance of hospitals by analyzing clinical outcomes for patients diagnosed with heart failure and heart attacks and for those who received coronary bypass surgery and angioplasties.

“Receiving the 100 Top Hospitals award for cardiovascular care validates the efforts our physicians and staff are making to providing the highest quality patient care,” says Mary Poskie, director of cardiovascular services at Saint Joseph Mercy Health System. “We are proud to be recipients of this award because it confirms our commitment to quality and safety.”

St. Joseph Mercy Hospital prides itself on its CardiacAdvantage™ program. CardiacAdvantage is an Advanced Cardiovascular Approach that changes the way patients and their referring physicians experience cardiovascular care. The CardiacAdvantage consistently provides the highest level of communication and collaboration between referring physicians and cardiovascular specialists to achieve high-quality outcomes for patients.

This collaborative approach to heart care ensures patient safety and that the highest level of care is being provided to all patients. St. Joe’s is named as a 100 Top Hospitals cardiovascular winner because of this high standard of care.

“These hospitals provide enormous value to their communities because heart disease is still the nation’s number one killer. They have set the new national standard for cardiovascular disease outcomes, process of care, efficiency, and lower costs,” said Jean Chenoweth, senior vice president for performance improvement and 100 Top Hospitals programs in the Healthcare business of Thomson Reuters.

The study, in its tenth year, found that the 100 Top Hospitals cardiovascular award winners, as a group, performed 63 percent more bypass surgeries and 42 percent more angioplasties than peer hospitals. This may suggest that performance of bypass surgery is increasingly performed in centers of excellence.

While the average mortality rate for cardiovascular patients is very low (3.4 percent), the mortality rate for bypass surgery was 26 percent lower in the 100 Top Hospitals cardiovascular winners. The award-winning hospitals demonstrated higher performance on the evidence-based core measures published by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and cost $1,542 less per case, on average.

The 100 Top Hospitals study focused on short-term, acute care, non-federal U.S. hospitals that treat a broad spectrum of cardiology patients. Thomson Reuters researchers analyzed 2006 and 2007 Medicare Provider Analysis and Review (MedPAR) data, 2007 Medicare cost reports, and data from other sources. They scored hospitals in key performance areas: risk-adjusted medical mortality, risk-adjusted surgical mortality, risk-adjusted complications, core measures score, percentage of coronary bypass patients with internal mammary artery use, procedure volume, severity-adjusted average length of stay, and wage- and severity-adjusted average cost.

The measures were calculated for three classes of hospitals with the following number of winners in each:

• Teaching with cardiovascular residency programs, 30 winners
• Teaching without cardiovascular residency programs, 40 winners
• Community, 30 winners