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Yale-New Haven Hospital: leading the charge in time-saving measures for heart attack patients
Yale-New Haven Hospital is leading the charge in a country-wide hospital effort to reduce the time it takes to deliver emergency angioplasty, the “door-to-balloon time” from arrival in the emergency department to angioplasty for patients experiencing a heart attack. YNHH has assumed a leadership role in the delivery of reliable, evidence-based care for heart attacks and consistently ranks in the 90th percentile in publicly-reported Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services measures of care for heart attacks.
Elsewhere on this site
• Angioplasty - FAQs
• Heart attack patients do better at hospitals specializing in angioplasty
• Transfer for angioplasty benefits heart attack patients
• Interventional Radiology
Related information
• Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
• American College of Cardiology
• American Heart Association
• National Institutes of Health
“Angioplasty is the best emergency treatment for a common type of heart attack, if delivered in a timely way,” said cardiologist Henry Cabin, M.D., medical director of the Yale-New Haven Hospital Heart Center and its coronary care unit. “At Yale-New Haven Hospital, rapid time-to-treatment is a priority. The sooner the blocked artery that causes the heart attack is reopened, the less heart muscle dies, and the faster and more complete the patient’s recovery.”
YNHH is participating in the national heart care initiative “Door-to-Balloon (D2B): An Alliance for Quality” campaign. The D2B program was launched on November 14, 2006 by the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association. The D2B initiative is aimed at improving the timeliness of lifesaving therapy for patients with heart attacks at the nation’s hospitals that perform emergency angioplasty. Patients who receive prompt treatment are more likely to survive a common type of heart attack called ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI).
“Angioplasty is most effective when performed in hospitals that make it the first-line treatment for these heart attacks, rather than at centers where it is not the leading form of heart attack care,” said Dr. Cabin.
YNHH a model
“Many of the strategies that have been identified by the D2B campaign are modeled after Yale-New Haven,” said cardiologist Jaime Gerber, M.D., director of quality for the Yale-New Haven Hospital Heart Center. “It takes strong commitment by the senior leadership of the hospital to break down barriers in traditional care.”
“In YNHH’s ED, our treatment of acute myocardial infarction (MI), or destruction of heart tissue resulting from obstruction of the blood supply to the heart muscle, is 100 percent geared toward getting the patient and the catheterization lab team together as quickly as possible,” said Dr. Cabin. “We made the decision years ago that we would rely on angioplasty, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to open blocked arteries and we have designed our systems around that goal. The median D2B time – from when the patient enters Yale-New Haven’s ED to the moment that the artery is cleared by balloon dilation in the catheterization lab — is 85 minutes, well within the American Heart Association’s recommended standard of 90 minutes.”
Next page: How the Heart Works
Last revised: December 27, 2004 (dh)
