Northwest Hospital Receives Get With The Guidelines-Stroke Gold Plus Quality Achievement Award

Baltimore, MD - Northwest Hospital has received the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association's Get With The Guidelines®-Stroke Gold Plus Quality Achievement Award. This award acknowledges the hospital's commitment to making sure stroke patients receive treatment based on the latest scientific evidence and nationally recognized, research-based guidelines.

Northwest Hospital earned this designation with the goals of speeding up recovery and reducing death and disability for stroke patients. The hospital achieved these by using specific quality measures to diagnose, evaluate, treat and follow up with stroke patients during a designated time frame. In addition, educating patients about managing their health, scheduling a follow-up visit after discharge and sharing other care transition interventions are important award guidelines.

Northwest Hospital also received the association's Target: StrokeSM Elite Plus Quality Achievement Award. To be considered for this recognition, hospitals had to meet quality measures developed to reduce the time between a patient's arrival at the hospital and treatment with the clot-buster tissue plasminogen activator, or tPA, the only drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat ischemic stroke.

Eric E. Smith, M.D., national chairman of the Get With The Guidelines Steering Committee and an associate professor of neurology at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada says, "We are pleased to recognize Northwest Hospital for its commitment to treating stroke patients because research shows that hospitals which follow the clinical measures of the Get With The Guidelines quality improvement initiative tend to see fewer readmissions and lower mortality rates."

According to the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association, stroke is the No. 5 cause of death and a leading cause of adult disability in the United States. On average, someone in the U.S. suffers a stroke every 40 seconds and nearly 795,000 people suffer a new or recurrent stroke each year.

About Northwest Hospital:
Located in Randallstown, Maryland, Northwest Hospital serves the health care needs of people in the northwest Baltimore metro area, western Baltimore City, and Carroll and Howard counties. Northwest Hospital is part of LifeBridge Health, one of the largest providers of health services in Maryland. In addition to Northwest Hospital, LifeBridge Health includes Sinai Hospital, Carroll Hospital, Levindale Hebrew Geriatric Center and Hospital, and related subsidiaries and affiliates. For more information, go to lbhstaging22.lifebridgehealth.org

About Get With The Guidelines®
Get With The Guidelines® is the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association's hospital-based quality improvement program that provides hospitals with tools and resources to increase adherence to the latest research-based guidelines. Developed with the goal of saving lives and hastening recovery, Get With The Guidelines has touched the lives of more than 6 million patients since 2001. For more information, visit heart.org.

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