PHILADELPHIA – Penn Presbyterian Medical Center is the only hospital in Philadelphia to be selected as one of the nation’s “100 Top Hospitals” for cardiovascular care by Thomson Reuters, a leading news and information company. Each year, this award for cardiovascular services objectively measures performance on key criteria at the nation’s top-performing acute-care hospitals. This is the sixth year that Penn Presbyterian has been recognized with this honor.
“This distinction recognizes Penn Presbyterian’s consistent expertise in cardiac care, a tribute to the entire cardiovascular teams' collaborative medical efforts to care for our patients with complex heart conditions,” comments Michele Volpe, Penn Presbyterian Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer. “When compared with national averages, Penn Presbyterian cardiac patients have better outcomes.”
Patients come to Penn Presbyterian from down the street and across the region – more than half of cardiac inpatients travel from New Jersey and Delaware – seeking Penn Presbyterian’s expertise in complex arrhythmia management, interventional cardiology, noninvasive cardiology and cardiac imaging, preventive cardiology, vascular medicine and endovascular therapy, and women’s heart health. In addition to routine heart operations, surgeons also perform coronary artery bypass in high-risk patients, complex aortic surgery, heart valve repair and minimally invasive robotic-assisted cardiac surgery.
“We are honored and proud to have been recognized again by Thomson Reuters as a Top 100 Cardiovascular Hospital,” said Harvey Waxman, MD, chief of Cardiology at Penn Presbyterian. “Our team of cardiovascular specialists is dedicated to caring for some of the most critically ill patients in the Delaware Valley through our unique Heart Rescue, advanced heart failure, vascular, and complex arrhythmia programs. It is rewarding to see that, in spite of the caring for the most critically ill patients, we are still able to achieve excellent clinical outcomes.”
The Thomson Reuters study identifies the nation's top providers of cardiovascular service using the two most recent years of data. Thomson Reuters scored facilities in eight 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: teaching with cardiovascular residency programs, teaching without cardiovascular residency programs, and community.
These measures help to produce benchmarks to improve cardiology standards of care for hospitals across the country. The study found that top-performing facilities consistently outperform their peers, have higher survival rates, lower complications indices and shorter lengths of stay compared with the peer group hospitals.
Among the key findings:
- Winning hospitals performed 63 percent more bypass surgeries and 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 2008 "Thomson Reuters 100 Top Hospitals(R): Cardiovascular Benchmarks for Success " study appeared in the November 17th edition of Modern Healthcare magazine. A complete listing of winners and a report summary is available at www.100tophospitals.com.
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PENN Medicine is a $3.6 billion enterprise dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, and excellence in patient care. PENN Medicine consists of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine (founded in 1765 as the nation's first medical school) and the University of Pennsylvania Health System.
Penn's School of Medicine is currently ranked #4 in the nation in U.S.News & World Report's survey of top research-oriented medical schools; and, according to most recent data from the National Institutes of Health, received over $379 million in NIH research funds in the 2006 fiscal year. Supporting 1,700 fulltime faculty and 700 students, the School of Medicine is recognized worldwide for its superior education and training of the next generation of physician-scientists and leaders of academic medicine.
The University of Pennsylvania Health System (UPHS) includes its flagship hospital, the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, rated one of the nation’s top ten “Honor Roll” hospitals by U.S.News & World Report; Pennsylvania Hospital, the nation's first hospital; and Penn Presbyterian Medical Center. In addition UPHS includes a primary-care provider network; a faculty practice plan; home care, hospice, and nursing home; three multispecialty satellite facilities; as well as the Penn Medicine Rittenhouse campus, which offers comprehensive inpatient rehabilitation facilities and outpatient services in multiple specialties.
Penn Medicine is one of the world’s leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, excellence in patient care, and community service. The organization consists of the University of Pennsylvania Health System and Penn’s Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine, founded in 1765 as the nation’s first medical school.
The Perelman School of Medicine is consistently among the nation's top recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health, with $550 million awarded in the 2022 fiscal year. Home to a proud history of “firsts” in medicine, Penn Medicine teams have pioneered discoveries and innovations that have shaped modern medicine, including recent breakthroughs such as CAR T cell therapy for cancer and the mRNA technology used in COVID-19 vaccines.
The University of Pennsylvania Health System’s patient care facilities stretch from the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania to the New Jersey shore. These include the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, Chester County Hospital, Lancaster General Health, Penn Medicine Princeton Health, and Pennsylvania Hospital—the nation’s first hospital, founded in 1751. Additional facilities and enterprises include Good Shepherd Penn Partners, Penn Medicine at Home, Lancaster Behavioral Health Hospital, and Princeton House Behavioral Health, among others.
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