Heart Healthy

 Two Rio Grande Valley hospitals recently were named top facilities for cardiovascular care.

Harlingen Medical Center and Doctors Hospital at Renaissance, in Edinburg, are listed as two of the 100 Top Hospitals for Cardiovascular Care by Thomson Reuters, a for-profit company that provides health care research and databases to providers and hospitals.

The two Valley hospitals are ranked in the community hospital category.

To make the list, hospitals had to meet or exceed certain benchmarks in treating heart failure and heart attacks, such as achieving low death rates and low rates of complications after heart surgery.

"It's really hard to win this (distinction)," said Jean Chenoweth, senior vice president for performance improvement at Thomson Reuters. "To have two hospitals win is really a fabulous result for a community."

The company analyzed Medicare data, looking at mortality rates, lengths of hospital stays, complication rates, procedure costs and the number of heart surgeries performed at hospitals, among other measures.

Hospitals don't pay to participate in the study, or pay to promote its results.

Only six hospitals in Texas made the list this year, including Heart Hospital of Austin, Memorial City Medical Center in Houston, Memorial Hermann Hospital System in Houston and Scott & White Memorial Hospital in Temple.

Harlingen Medical Center officials said that they were pleased to hear the news.

"We've always had an emphasis on cardiology," said Dr. Hugo Blake, medical director at the facility and a cardiologist. "We get very good results - good clinical outcomes."

Being included on the list is an honor, said Marissa Castañeda, spokeswoman for Doctors Hospital at Renaissance.

"We were excited ... knowing we exceeded core measures and were able to rank among the hospitals in this group," Castañeda said.

Valley Baptist Medical Center-Harlingen made the top-hospitals list in 2007, but did not appear this year. That doesn't necessarily mean the quality of cardiac care at the facility has suffered, Chenoweth of Thomson Reuters said.

"Sometimes hospitals miss it by one one-thousandth of a point," she said.

The fact that three Valley hospitals have appeared on the list speaks well for the quality of cardiac care in the region, Chenoweth said.

"It shows that not only has cardiovascular care improved there, it's among the top in the United States," she said.

melissam@valleystar.com