Elgin, IL – Sherman Hospital was recently named one of the nation's 100 Top cardiovascular hospitals by Evanston, IL.-based Solucient®. Sherman Hospital was one of only 30 community hospitals nationwide to make this elite list.

The annual Solucient award for cardiovascular services objectively measures performance on key criteria at the nation's top performing acute-care hospitals. This is the first time Sherman Hospital has been recognized with this prestigious honor.

“This recognition is a testimony to the high quality of physicians, nurses and technologists who provide heart care at Sherman Hospital,” said Rick Floyd, Sherman Health President & CEO.

The 2005 Solucient 100 Top Hospitals®: Cardiovascular Benchmarks for Success study appears in the Oct. 31 edition of Modern Healthcare magazine. As the nation's leading source of information products for the healthcare industry, Solucient provides tools and vital insights that healthcare managers use to improve the performance of their organizations. Solucient's expertise and proven solutions enable providers, payers and pharmaceutical companies to drive business growth, manage costs and deliver high quality care.

“We are exceptionally proud of this recognition as it highlights Sherman Hospital’s dedication to providing patients with cardiovascular disease the highest quality care possible,” said Dr. Ian Jones, Vice President for Clinical Performance at Sherman Health. “This is not an easy list to make,” added Dr. Jones.

Among the key findings:

• States with higher rates of revascularization (angioplasty and bypass surgery) for treatment of the most severe form of heart attacks are experiencing higher survival rates, with great variation by state in revascularization rates for these kinds of heart attacks.

• Survival rates for patients with this type of heart attack are equally good whether they are directly admitted for revascularization or are stable enough to be transferred to another facility providing the procedures.

• Winners of the 100 Top Hospitals Cardiovascular award were more likely than peer hospitals to provide revascularization to patients with the most severe heart attacks.

• One kind of post-operative complication for all revascularized patients — post-operative hemorrhage or hematoma — is rapidly declining while another — post-operative sepsis — seems to be increasing.

• If cardiovascular services in all acute-care hospitals performed at the same level as the hospitals with the nation's top cardiovascular services, 10,000 additional cardiovascular patients could survive each year; and an additional 1,100 patients could be complication-free.

• Winning hospitals are 23 percent less likely than non-winners to have post-operative infections and about 20 percent less likely than non-winners to have post-operative hemorrhage for patients undergoing coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) or percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI).

• Winning hospitals annually perform as much as 80 percent more bypass surgeries and PCIs, including angioplasties, as their peers.

• Cardiovascular patients at winning hospitals return to everyday life faster than those at non-winning hospitals. Patients at the winning hospitals were released more than a half-day earlier than patients at peer hospitals.

• Average cardiovascular-related costs for benchmark hospitals were nearly 15 percent lower than at peer hospitals.

The seventh edition of the Solucient 100 Top Hospitals®: Cardiovascular Benchmarks for Success study analyzed acute-care hospitals nationwide using detailed empirical performance data from publicly available Medicare MedPAR data and Medicare cost reports. 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

Solucient® scored facilities in seven key performance areas: risk-adjusted medical mortality, risk-adjusted surgical mortality, complications, percentage of CABG patients with internal mammary artery use, procedure volume, severity-adjusted average length of stay, and wage and severity-adjusted average cost.