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Woodland Healthcare receives Get With The Guidelines-Stroke Silver Plus Quality Achievement Award

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Woodland Healthcare has received the Get With The Guidelines®-Stroke Silver Plus Quality Achievement Award from the American Heart Association. The award recognizes Woodland Healthcare's commitment and success in implementing a higher standard of care by ensuring that stroke patients receive treatment according to nationally accepted guidelines.

This marks the fifth year that Woodland Healthcare has been recognized with a quality achievement award.

Get With The Guidelines–Stroke helps Woodland Healthcare’s staff develop and implement acute and secondary prevention guideline processes to improve patient care and outcomes. The program provides hospitals with a web-based patient management tool, best practice discharge protocols and standing orders, along with a robust registry and real-time benchmarking capabilities to track performance.

The quick and efficient use of guideline procedures can improve the quality of care for stroke patients and may reduce disability and save lives. 

“We are pleased to recognize Woodland Healthcare for their commitment to stroke care,” said Deepak L. Bhatt, M.D., M.P.H., national chairman of the Get With The Guidelines steering committee and Chief of Cardiology at VA Boston Healthcare System, Senior Physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. “Published scientific studies are providing us with evidence that Get With The Guidelines works. Patients are getting the right care they need when they need it. That’s resulting in increased survival.”

Following Get With The Guidelines-Stroke treatment guidelines, patients are started on aggressive risk-reduction therapies including the use of medications such as tPA, antithrombotics and anticoagulation therapy, along with cholesterol reducing drugs and smoking cessation counseling. These are all aimed at reducing death and disability and improving the lives of stroke patients. Hospitals must adhere to these measures at a set level for a designated period of time to be eligible for the achievement awards. 

“Woodland Healthcare is dedicated to making our care for stroke patients among the best in the country. The American Heart Association’s Get With The Guidelines–Stroke program helps us to accomplish this goal,” said Michael Patmas, MD, Chief Medical Officer at Woodland Healthcare. “This recognition demonstrates that we are on the right track and we’re very proud of our team.”

According to the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association, stroke is one of the leading causes of death and serious, long-term disability in the United States. On average, someone suffers a stroke every 40 seconds; someone dies of a stroke every four minutes; and 795,000 people suffer a new or recurrent stroke each year.

Publish date: 

Friday, November 01, 2013

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Media Contact: 

Lindsay Leszczynski 
External Communications Manager
[email protected]