Heart Attack Patients Fare Best at Doylestown Hospital

Most visitors come to Doylestown to shop or to dine or to be entertained.

Kathleen Vanderbush came here to have a heart attack.

She didn't plan it that way, but that's what happened when the New York woman and her sister visited a friend in Doylestown on Aug. 23.

When Vanderbush had chest pains a few hours into her visit, her friend, Odette Rossi, who lives in the borough, whisked her down the street to . Doctors diagnosed her heart attack and admitted her to the hospital for treatment.

Vanderbush's experience at Doylestown Hospital left her so amazed and overwhelmed that she's only half joking when she says she would consider driving her husband the two and a half hours down here if he were ever to have a heart attack.

"I’ve been in many heart hospitals, and I’ve never seen care like I got at Doylestown," said Vanderbush, 61. "Everyone I met from the minute I walked into the emergency room to the day I walked out, was amazing. Doylestown just shocked me beyond belief."

Vanderbush isn't the only one singing the hospital's praises. The Heart Institute of Doylestown Hospital recently achieved some high profile rankings.

Patients who are treated for a heart attack are more likely to survive at Doylestown Hospital than at any other hospital in Pennsylvania. Doylestown is ranked No. 1 for heart attack survivability in the state and fourth best in the country.

"Out of 5,000 hospitals in the country, that's pretty good," said John Mitchell, the hospital's executive director of cardiovascular services. "It's a consistent effort; we're always looking at ways to improve."

Those rankings are based on three years worth of data - July 2007 to June 2010 -  reported to the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services, which can be viewed online at the CMS website. USA Today also put together a user-friendly and searchable interactive graphic using the CMS data.

The findings are based on a critical measure - how a patient fares within 30 days after treatment. The 30-day mortality rate for heart attack patients is 10.9% at Doylestown Hospital; the national average is 15.9%, according to CMS.

The high marks reflect well not just on the doctors, nurses and technicians in the heart program but up and down the continuum of patient care, said Dr. Scott Levy, the hospital's chief medical officer.

"It's not just the cardiologist, it's also the ambulance crews that bring patients in already running EKGs on them, it's the ER nurses, it's everything we do in the hospital," said Levy, who has worked at Doylestown Hospital since 1990, the past seven years as chief of medicine. "Every associate here has had something to do with the heart program and its successes."

These days, Doylestown Hospital performs an average of about 2,000 heart catheterizations, 700 interventional procedures such as stent placements or angioplasties and 200 heart surgeries each year.

In a new report released Tuesday, HealthGrades gave Doylestown a top rating, 5 stars, for its treatment of heart attack patients. It's the highest rank of any hospital in Bucks County and the sixth year in a row the hospital has garnered five stars. A quality comparison of doctors and hospitals in the Philadelphia area can be found online here.

Medical professionals call such measures "outcomes." Patients like Vanderbush call them another chance at life.

She, her sister and Rossi, their Doylestown friend, had had lunch at the the afternoon of Aug. 23. Then, they felt the earth move, when the .

The trio had moved on to visit the home of one of Rossi's clients - she cares for pets - when Vanderbush felt "this strange twisting feeling" in her chest.

She told her friends she wasn't feeling well, said maybe she would just drive back home to New York. But Rossi took one look at her chalk-pale face and said no way. Off to Doylestown Hospital they went.

"They told me if I had tried to make it home, it would have been very bad, if I had made it home at all," said Vanderbush, who is from Goshen, NY. "In the end, the damage to my heart was minimal because I got help so immediately.

"And when I left, Doylestown sent me away with all of the pictures of my heart, all of my bloodwork, the pictures of the stents. The cardiologist up here was amazed," she continued. "They sent me away with everything regarding my stay there. They’re like the gift that keeps giving - they’re still helping me out. Most hospitals don’t do that."