CMHVI earns top quality recognition for heart surgery

Lewiston, Maine - A national professional organization has awarded its highest rating to the Central Maine Heart and Vascular Institute’s cardiac surgery program.

The Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS) has awarded a three-star rating to CMHVI for the quality of its heart surgery program for 2013. The STS comprehensive rating system compares the quality of cardiac surgery among hospitals nationwide. “Only 10 to 15 percent of all hospitals that perform open heart surgery receive the three star rating, which denotes the highest category of quality” said Carmine Frumiento, M.D., a cardiothoracic surgeon at CMHVI.

In a recent analysis of national data
covering the 2012-2013 period, CMHVI’s cardiac surgery performance was in the highest quality tier, earning the Lewiston-based program the STS three-star rating.

"This top ranking designation demonstrates that patients who undergo cardiac surgery at CMHVI receive outstanding clinical care by a dedicated team of professionals in the caring environment of our single stay unit,” said CMHVI Executive Director Susan Horton.

The STS comprehensive rating system allows for nationwide comparisons of cardiac surgery quality among some 750 hospitals. The system considers many categories of cardiac surgery data on an annual basis. The data in the STS analysis includes avoidance of mortality, avoidance of major complications, use of arteries as bypass grafts, and the administration of all appropriate pre- and post-operative medications.

The STS developed a national database in 1989 as part of an effort to improve quality and patient safety in cardiothoracic surgery. The STS database focuses on three cardiothoracic surgery subspecialties: adult cardiac, general thoracic, and congenital heart surgery. The STS has developed 11 measures of quality divided into four broad categories or domains. These individual measures and the overall composite measure methodology used by STS are endorsed by the National Quality Forum and have received careful scrutiny by national quality measure experts.

“This top ranking reflects the commitment of the surgeons and the cardiovascular support team involved in the care of our patients to provide the highest level of excellence to the surgical patients,” said Paul Weldner, M.D., a cardiac valvular heart surgeon at CMHVI.

The STS Adult Cardiac Surgery Database is the largest registry of its kind in the world. It includes some 4.5 million cardiothoracic surgical records from 1,100 surgical groups in the United States.