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St. Agnes Healthcare First Accredited Chest Pain Center in Maryland

First Chest Pain Center in the World Receives Superior Review

BALTIMORE, MD – December 23, 2003. The Society of Chest Pain Centers has granted the designation of Accredited Chest Pain Center to Saint Agnes Healthcare, making it the first Chest Pain Center in Maryland to receive accreditation.

St. Agnes Healthcare met, and often exceeded, the criteria required to be an accredited Chest Pain Center. Based on the strength of the hospital’s overall commitment to community service and their medical and nursing expertise, the site visit team recommended full accreditation to the Accreditation Review Committee. Additionally, Saint Agnes Healthcare is commended for their Early Heart Attack Care (EHAC) program. This community outreach program is the strongest and only complete program that the Society has witnessed to-date. According to Scott Soronen, lead reviewer for the Society’s accreditation team, “The St. Agnes Chest Pain Center is a national model. If I wanted to show someone how to do it right, I would show them the St. Agnes center.”

Heart attacks are the leading cause of death in the United States, with 600,000 dying annually of heart disease. More than five million Americans visit hospitals each year with chest pain. The goal of the Society of Chest Pain Centers is to significantly reduce the mortality rate of these patients by teaching the public to recognize and react to the early symptoms of a possible heart attack, reduce the time that it takes to receive treatment, and increase the accuracy and effectiveness of treatment.

The Chest Pain Center’s protocol-driven and systematic approach to patient management allows physicians to reduce time to treatment during the critical early stages of a heart attack, when treatments are most effective, and to better monitor patients when it is not clear whether they are having a coronary event. Such observation helps ensure that a patient is neither sent home too early nor needlessly admitted.

With the rise of Chest Pain Centers came the need to establish standards designed to improve the consistency and quality of care provided to patients. The Society’s accreditation process insures centers meet or exceed quality-of-care measures in acute cardiac medicine.

The Chest Pain Center at St. Agnes Healthcare has demonstrated its expertise and commitment to quality patient care by meeting or exceeding a wide set of stringent criteria and completing on-site evaluations by a review team from the Society of Chest Pain Centers. Key areas in which a Chest Pain Center must demonstrate expertise include:

• Integrating the emergency department with the local emergency medical system
• Assessing, diagnosing, and treating patients quickly
• Effectively treating patients with low risk for acute coronary syndrome and no assignable cause for their symptoms
• Having a functional design that promotes optimal patient care
• Insuring Chest Pain Center personnel competency and training
• Maintaining organizational structure and commitment
• Continually seeking to improve processes and procedures
• Supporting community outreach programs that educate the public to promptly seek medical care if they display symptoms of a possible heart attack

“In the era when cardiac care units (CCUs) had just been implemented across the country, Dr. Raymond D. Bahr, medical director of The Paul Dudley White Coronary Care System - St. Agnes Healthcare and a founder of the Society, understood that hospitals needed to improve early cardiac care and outreach into the community. It was his early vision that resulted in the first Chest Pain Center at St. Agnes Healthcare in 1981. From those beginnings, an operational model for delivering care has been developed that bridges cardiac care and the emergency department and with the focus on patient’s needs. It is a special privilege for the Society to announce that St. Agnes Healthcare is the first Accredited Chest Pain Center in Maryland,” said Dr. Anthony Joseph, president of the Society of Chest Pain Centers.

About St. Agnes Healthcare
Founded In 1862, St. Agnes was the first Catholic hospital in Baltimore. Originally created to provide nursing care for the poor, the facility moved to its present location in 1876 and was reorganized as a full-service hospital in 1906. Today St. Agnes Healthcare is a full-service community teaching hospital with residency programs in a number of medical/surgical specialties. St. Agnes’ Chest Pain Center was the first Chest Pain Center in the world in 1981. For more information, visit www.stagnes.com and www.ehac.org.

About the Society of Chest Pain Centers
The Society of Chest Pain Centers (SCPC) is an international professional society focused on improving care for patients with acute coronary syndromes and related maladies. The Society is committed to improving the quality of patient care through protocol-based medicine and the adoption of process improvement science to healthcare. SCPC is headquartered in Columbus, Ohio. For more information, visit www.scpcp.org.

For more information on the St. Agnes Chest Pain Center or EHAC, or to speak with Dr. Bahr contact: John Welby at 410-368-2144 or jwelby@stagnes.org.

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