The American Heart Association/American Stroke Association has recognized West Boca Medical Center’s Primary Stroke Center for excellence in stroke care.
Specifically, West Boca earned the Association’s Get With The Guidelines-Stroke Gold Plus Quality Achievement Award with Target: Stroke Honor Roll-Elite. The award with a big name recognizes hospitals nationwide that provide the most appropriate stroke treatment based on established scientific guidelines.
This is important news for local stroke patients. Why? To qualify for the Target: Stroke Honor Roll-Elite, for example, hospitals must meet quality measures aimed at reducing the time from when a stroke patient arrives at the hospital and is treated with the clot-buster tissue plasminogen activator, or tPA. The only drug approved by the FDA to treat the most common type of stroke, called ischemic stroke, tPA has been shown to notably reduce stroke effects and disability, if delivered in the first three hours after the start of stroke symptoms.
West Boca’s achievement of the Target: Stroke Honor Roll-Elite means the stroke team treated 75 percent or more of acute ischemic stroke patients with intravenous tPA within 60 minutes of their arrival to the hospital.
To receive the Gold Plus Quality Achievement Award, hospitals must achieve 85 percent or higher adherence to all Get With The Guidelines-Stroke achievement indicators for two or more consecutive 12-month periods and achieve 75 percent or higher compliance with five of eight Get With The Guidelines-Stroke Quality measures.
In essence, the West Boca stroke care team is doing a good job at following the most up-to-date, evidence based guidelines for care. That means possible reductions in death and disability for local stroke patients.
Stroke is the fifth leading cause of death and among the top causes of adult disability in the U.S. On average, a stroke occurs every 40 seconds, and someone dies of stroke every four minutes in the U.S., according to the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association
West Boca Medical Center is located at 21644 State Road 7.
