South Georgia Medical Center celebrates two prestigious recognitions including receipt of the American Heart Association’s Get With The Guidelines- Resuscitation Bronze Quality Achievement Award for successful in-hospital resuscitations of Code Blue patients and the announcement of the receipt of the U.S. National Institutes of Health/Yale University Silver-AMI Research Grant. SGMC is one of 62 hospitals nationwide participating in the study.    

Get With The Guidelines: Resuscitation Bronze Award:

Hospitals receiving this award have demonstrated a commitment to treating cardiac arrest patients with 85% of higher compliance to core standard levels of care as outlined by the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association for 90 consecutive days. The Get With The Guidelines-Resuscitation program aims to help hospital teams save more lives threatened by cardiopulmonary emergencies by consistently following the most up-to-date scientific guidelines for treating patients who suffer a cardiac arrest in the hospital.

Get With The Guidelines-Resuscitation builds on the work of the AHA’s National Registry of CardioPulmonary Resuscitation, originally launched in 1999 as a database of in-hospital resuscitation events from more than 500 hospitals. The data from the registry and now the quality program gives participating hospitals feedback on their resuscitation practice and patient outcomes and has been used to develop new evidence-based guidelines for in-hospital resuscitation.

SILVER-AMI: Outcomes in Older Persons With Heart Attacks:

SGMC was chosen to participate in this study, with the overall objective being to develop and validate risk stratification tools for older adults who have recently had an Acute Myocardial Infarction (AMI). While there is emerging interest in understanding the role of geriatric conditions as they pertain to cardiovascular outcomes, there is no standard, feasible assessment of older patients with AMI that can stratify their risk of subsequent morbidity and mortality. Currently available risk models are designed solely to predict clinical events (e.g. mortality, reinfarction). This is insufficient for shared decision making with older patients, who consistently rate maintenance of favorable health status as a top priority. This study will address these gaps by melding principles from geriatrics and cardiology to create post-AMI risk models specifically designed for older patients. This study is significant because older persons with AMI are a growing, yet understudied, population.

The estimated study enrollment is 3,000 and began in January 2013 and is estimated to end in December 2016. There are 51 study locations across the United States, with South Georgia Medical Center and Emory University being the only two in Georgia.