AMI Heart Attack/Heart Failure
University of Illinois at Chicago Medical Center recognizes the importance of expedient and professional care in the treatment of an AMI Heart Attack or chronic Heart Failure. We offer around the clock availability of a team of cardiologists, internists, nurses, pharmacists, and other specialists who deliver care per best practice protocols that are individualized to each patient’s needs.
In addition, we have a special quality improvement team chaired by a cardiologist, which measures how well we are doing and implements any recommendations to excel the care even further. Our data demonstrates that we provide recommended medication management with beta blockers and aspirin in 97-100% of our patients who may be a candidate. In addition, despite the low national success rates for smokers being able to successfully quit, we are committed to helping our patients with this difficult task. To accomplish this, we established a new process to allow our nurses to automatically refer smokers to our Smoking Cessation Clinic, where they can get trained counseling and medical therapy assistance. We also give our patients educational materials on their cardiology condition and resources to quit smoking.
Our inpatient mortality rate following a heart attack is lower than expected for the patients we treat, and overall has been lower than both statewide and national comparative rates.
For the management of Heart Failure, our performance for treatment with ace inhibitors has exceeded the national and statewide averages. The areas we have worked to improve have been with smoking cessation counseling, and also with providing our patients with written discharge instructions on how to manage their care at home with their diet, activity, medications, and other factors. Our physicians, nurses, and pharmacists provide education in all of these areas, but we recognize that the information would be more useful to patients if organized into a format they could refer to at home. We have established a set of discharge instructions in English and Spanish which are now available for our heart failure patients.
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Pneumonia
When patients are admitted to our hospital with pneumonia they receive expedient treatment in our Emergency Room as part of the initial stage of their care. That includes oxygen assessment and blood cultures, which our data demonstrates that we exceed both state and national rates. We have greatly improved our success with counseling our patients to quit smoking. We are establishing a new process to encourage these high risk patients to accept flu and pneumonia vaccines to prevent future illness. In addition, even though the majority of our patients receive their antibiotics within a four hour window, we need to improve the recording of this information in our Emergency Room medical record so that it reflects our practice. New medication order sets and forms have been created to allow this.
Overall
We hope our patients will use the information to discuss their care with their University of Illinois Medical Center physician. Helping you understand your care is one of our goals, and providing you with the best care possible is what you can expect.
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