More systems are leaning on decentralized cardiac care to meet the needs of their patients, but building an academic-level heart program inside a community hospital comes with many challenges. Foremost, when is a hospital ready to offer advanced cardiac care?
Northwestern Medicine’s Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute in Chicago has been expanding advanced cardiac services to community hospitals across the system for a few years. Leaders said knowing which hospital program is ready to advance starts with performance.
“[The first sign is] consistent performance at your current level of care — strong outcomes with very little variability, and a team executing reliably day by day,” Ian Cohen, MD, the Charles and Barbara Strang medical director of the Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute at Northwestern Medicine Catherine Gratz Griffin Lake Forest (Ill.) Hospital, said on an upcoming episode of Becker’s “Cardiology and Heart Surgery Podcast.” “If the fundamentals aren’t there, adding complexity only amplifies risk. You have to have your ABCs down.”
The second sign is care continuity and access. Hospitals that are ready for high-acuity care have systems in place to identify disease early both in inpatient and outpatient care without fragmentation, Dr. Cohen said. And the third sign is having strong outcomes and quality metrics.
“Readiness is always earned, never declared,” Sarah Plaskett, vice president of operations at the Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute, said on the podcast. “Before adding complexity, we have to make sure we’re delivering excellence at what we’re currently doing. It’s also important to stay current with advancing technology and think carefully about how to integrate it into the community hospital setting. When we bring academic medical center practices into the region, we want to blend them thoughtfully with regional differences — to appreciate what can and cannot be done within that care model. That expertise, and the mutual respect between the academic center and the health network, has been what allows us to keep advancing.”
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