Heart Care

Get With The GuidelinesSM

What does the Get With The GuidelinesSM initiative mean to you, as a patient at RWJ Hamilton?

Get With The GuidelinesSM is an initiative, developed by the American Heart Association to help close the treatment gap regarding prevention of cardiovascular disease and stroke.

Everyday, across the country, hospitals treat victims of heart attacks and coronary artery disease. But there are many hospitals that take the treatment of these patients one step further. A Get With The Guidelines-Coronary Artery Disease (GWTG-CAD) designated hospital, like RWJ Hamilton, has a preventive program in place that educates patients on ways to reduce the risk of a recurrent heart attack, thus potentially saving their lives.

Under this program, coronary patients are started on aggressive risk reduction therapies such as cholesterol-lowering drugs, aspirin, ACE inhibitors and beta-blockers in the hospital and receive smoking cessation and weight management counseling and referrals for cardiac rehabilitation before being discharged. These standards of care are outlined in the American Heart Association / American College of Cardiology secondary prevention guidelines for patients with coronary artery disease.

The program also includes quality-improvement measures such as care maps, discharge protocols, standing orders and measurement tools. Designed to be quick and efficient, these guideline tools enable RWJ Hamilton to improve the quality of care it provides cardiac patients, save lives, and ultimately reduce health care costs by lowering the recurrence of heart attacks.

Projections have shown that if this Get With The GuidelinesSM program was implemented nationwide, more than 80,000 lives could be saved each year.

for more information, visit www.americanheart.org/getwiththeguidelines