White Plains Hospital Again Receives Stroke Achievement Award

For the thirteenth year in a row, White Plains Hospital has been recognized with the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association’s Get With The Guidelines®-Stroke Gold Plus Quality Achievement Award. This Award recognizes the Hospital’s success in ensuring that stroke patients receive the most appropriate treatment according to nationally recognized, research-based guidelines based on the latest scientific evidence.

White Plains Hospital also made the Association’s Target: StrokeSM Elite Honor Roll for meeting stroke quality measures that reduce the time between a patient’s arrival at the hospital and treatment with the clot-buster tissue plasminogen activator, or tPA, the only drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat ischemic stroke. If administered within the first three hours after the start of stroke symptoms, tPA has been shown to significantly reduce the effects of stroke and reduce the chance of permanent disability.

Hospitals must achieve a time to thrombolytic therapy within 60 minutes or less in at least 75 percent of acute ischemic stroke patients treated with IV tPA to meet Elite Honor Roll criteria. To receive the Gold Plus Quality Achievement Award, they must achieve 85 percent or higher adherence to all Get with the Guidelines-Stroke indicators for two or more consecutive years and 75 percent or higher compliance with five of eight Get with the Guidelines-Stroke Quality measures.

“This Award demonstrates our commitment to delivering advanced stroke care to patients in Westchester and surrounding areas expediently and safely,” said Michael Palumbo, M.D., Executive Vice President and Chief Medical Officer at White Plains Hospital.

The Ruth & Jerome A. Siegel Stroke Center at White Plains Hospital is Westchester County's first New York State designated Regional Stroke Center, indicating the Hospital’s ability to diagnose and treat strokes using a highly specialized stroke team.

According to the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association, stroke is the fifth leading cause of death and a leading cause of adult disability in the United States. On average, someone in the U.S. suffers a stroke every 40 seconds, someone dies of a stroke every four minutes, and nearly 800,000 people suffer a new or recurrent stroke each year.