How The Best Get Better
COVID-19 changed us all in 2020. While it has been hard, we have learned
a great deal and our Kaweah Delta Heart and Vascular teams have never
stopped caring for our community. Even in the midst of the pandemic, our
affiliation with the Cleveland Clinic Heart, Vascular and Thoracic Institute,
ranked #1 in the nation for heart care since 1995 by U.S. News & World
Report, helped us further elevate services for people seeking cardiovascular
care in the Central Valley.
Prior to our affiliation in 2019, we spent 34 years building a very strong
and comprehensive cardiovascular program. The hard work and expertise
of our cardiovascular and open-heart teams, which include expert cardiac
surgeons, cardiologists, cardiac anesthesiologists, vascular surgeons,
nurses, technicians and many other Kaweah Delta staff members, have earned
us national recognition in recent years.
In 2020, Healthgrades, a benchmarking and reporting healthcare organization
created to help consumers make educated choices about their health providers,
released a national study in which Kaweah Delta was named among the top
five percent of the nation’s hospitals and recognized as one of
America’s 50 Best Hospitals™ for Cardiac Surgery for four
years in a row. Kaweah Delta is just one of seven hospitals in California,
and the only one in the Central Valley, to receive the distinction as
one of America’s 50 Best Hospitals™ for Cardiac Surgery. Additionally,
Kaweah Delta was a Five-Star Award Recipient for the treatment of heart
failure, valve surgery, and coronary bypass – and for the fifth
year in row, received a Cardiac Surgery Excellence Award. These honors,
as well as others in various specialties, helped make Kaweah Delta the
most awarded hospital in the Central Valley.
This affiliation between Kaweah Delta and the Cleveland Clinic is how the
best get better. We are proud of the innovative ways we have worked together
to expand our heart program and increase the quality of care for every
patient, every time. While Kaweah Delta and Cleveland Clinic cardiovascular
programs work closely together, our organizations, physicians, and staff
remain independent and unchanged.
As an affiliate, Kaweah Delta has access to best practices that have helped
the Cleveland Clinic’s heart program achieve U.S. News & World
Report’s No. 1 cardiology and heart surgery ranking for the past
26 years in a row. Also as affiliates, Kaweah Delta and Cleveland Clinic’s
heart programs share best practices in patient care, outcomes measurement,
quality reporting, and clinical research – and physician teams from
both entities collaborate to accelerate advances in heart care treatments
and protocols.
Other proud advancements include the implementation of same-day discharge
(SDD) after elective cardiac stent placement, which decreases the length
of time patients need to stay in the hospital after their procedure. If
a patient is a candidate for SDD, they are able to go home in just six
hours after their procedure. Our physicians have really embraced this
process but our patients are the happiest of all, knowing they’ll
be going home to sleep in their own bed on the night of their procedure.
Same-day discharge is made possible, in part, by the use of radial artery
access (entering through the wrist) for cardiac catheterization. Patients
who have had an angiogram or angioplasty using the femoral approach (entering
through the groin) are very familiar with lying flat in bed for what may
have seemed like an exorbitant amount of time, but patients who have had
the same procedure using the radial approach have a very different experience.
They are allowed to sit up, move around, and even walk immediately after
the procedure. Sitting up immediately post procedure is ideal for patients
with disease processes such as congestive heart failure, back pain, and/or
dementia. Studies have shown that patients prefer radial access to femoral
access because it is much more comfortable and, as a result, our patient
satisfaction rates have significantly increased, along with the number
of physicians who have adopted the practice.
The awards, success, and growth of the Kaweah Delta Heart and Vascular
Institute is reflective of the passion, commitment, and excellence in
heart care our team has delivered to Central Valley residents for more
than three decades. Our collaboration with Cleveland Clinic, a proven
top national performer has accelerated our progress toward becoming a
world-class heart program that benefits people throughout the region and
state. On our journey to world-class care, we are reaching new heights
in heart care and raising patient satisfaction levels as we make our way
to the very top.