Erlanger Baroness And East Hospitals’ Stroke Programs Receive Awards From American Heart Association

Erlanger Baroness Hospital and Erlanger East Hospital received awards from the American Heart Association and the American Stroke Association’s “Get with the Guidelines” program. Baroness Hospital received the “Target Stroke Gold Elite Plus” award and East Hospital earned the “Target Stroke Silver” award. 
 
To be a certified stroke center, it is required that data is collected from stroke patient encounters including door to needle times for IV TPA, door to puncture times for interventions, proper medications on discharge and patient education to name a few. This data is entered into the GWTG registry with national targets required for each metric. If a facility meets those metrics a certain percent of the time for a specific number of months consecutively they are awarded the target stroke award. This award has four levels; bronze, silver, gold and gold elite plus. The elite portion of the criteria references treating stroke patients with 85% or higher compliance to core standard levels of care as outlined by the American Heart Association and the American Stroke Association for 24 consecutive months. 
 
“Baroness has the region’s only Comprehensive Stroke Center, and Erlanger East Hospital has an Acute Stroke Ready Center providing high quality, acute complex stroke care to our community and region,” said Traci Jennings, assistant vice president of Erlanger Neurosciences Institute.   We have a great stroke team at Erlanger and I couldn’t be more proud of our accomplishments.” 
 
By improving stroke care, the “Get With The Guidelines Stroke” program benefits patients as well as hospitals. Numerous published studies demonstrate the program's success in improving patient outcomes. Since the program's start in 2003, over 2,000 hospitals have entered more than 5 million patient records into the “Get With The Guidelines Stroke” database. 
 
"Erlanger is home to a certified academic neurosciences center, which offers comprehensive, multidisciplinary treatments for a wide range of neurological conditions in pediatric and adult patients," officials said.  "The neuroscience center has several departments, including a neurosurgery and spine department and the Erlanger Southeast Regional Stroke Center. The Erlanger Southeast Regional Stroke Center also earned the Get With The Guidelines Gold Elite Plus Achievement Award in 2017."