In a national study of 970 hospitals, North Shore University Hospital (NSUH) has been ranked among the nation’s top 100 for cardiovascular care. The study by Thomson Reuters (formerly Solucient) lists NSUH among 30 teaching hospitals with cardiovascular residency programs, including such prestigious hospitals as the Mayo Clinic; the Cleveland Clinic; Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, MI; Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, NH; Penn Presbyterian Medical Center in Philadelphia, PA.; and Yale-New Haven Hospital in New Haven, CT.

Out of the top 30 hospitals with residency programs, NSUH is the only one in New York State to receive this prestigious award, known as the Thomson Reuters 100 Top Hospitals®: Cardiovascular Benchmarks for Success. Only two other hospitals in upstate New York made the top 100 list.

A leading provider of decision support solutions aimed at improving the clinical and business performance of healthcare organizations, Thomson Reuters examined the performance of 970 hospitals by analyzing clinical outcomes for patients diagnosed with heart failure and heart attacks, and for those who received coronary bypass surgery and angioplasties.

The coveted award is difficult to win for several reasons: It uses only statistical information to select the top performers from more than 3,000 hospitals across the country. As a result, award winners must perform well across eight separate measures. The hospital is then matched only to similar hospitals before computing and comparing scores to choose the top performers. Secondly, the measures in the study change from year to year, based on new and higher standards of care. In order to win, a hospital must keep up with those new standards of performance as well as develop new techniques to achieve better performance.

“This award distinguishes North Shore from other hospitals in the New York area and exemplifies the outstanding work performed by our cardiovascular team,” said Susan Somerville, NSUH’s executive director. “Our team approach enables us to adhere to safe and effective standards of care that are proven to produce better patient outcomes.”

The study focused on short-term, acute care, non-federal US hospitals that treat a broad spectrum of cardiology patients. NSUH scored in key performance areas of: risk-adjusted medical mortality, risk-adjusted surgical mortality, risk-adjusted complications, core measures, percentage of coronary bypass patients with internal mammary artery use, procedure volume, severity-adjusted average length of stay, and wage- and severity-adjusted averaged cost.

For a complete list of all of the winners of the Thomson Reuters 100 Top Hospitals®: Cardiovascular Benchmarks for Success, go to: www.thomsonreuters.com/content/press_room/tsh/TRAnnounces100TopHospitalsCardio