You Want the Best When it Comes to Aortic Valve Replacement – and You’ve Got It, Here in Brevard

By  //  July 30, 2021

Top score puts Health First program at elite level

The Health First Heart & Vascular Valve Clinic’s comprehensive team recently earned a three-star rating – the highest score possible. “This is quite an accomplishment, which continues to show our patients how much we care and are truly driven and determined to provide the highest level of care possible,” said Dr. Matthew Campbell, Director of Cardiothoracic Surgery with Health First, pictured above.

Health First’s Heart & Vascular team earns a three-star rating for AVR in patient care and outcomes – a highly distinguished ranking which only 6.2% of North American healthcare programs achieve.

BREVARD COUNTY, FLORIDA – Good news for you – it’s right here in your community.

The Health First Heart & Vascular Valve Clinic’s comprehensive team recently earned a three-star rating – the highest score possible – from the Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS) for its patient outcomes in Aortic Valve Replacement (AVR) procedures.

“This is quite an accomplishment, which continues to show our patients how much we care and are truly driven and determined to provide the highest level of care possible,” said Dr. Matthew Campbell, Director of Cardiothoracic Surgery with Health First.

The STS star rating system is one of the most sophisticated and highly regarded overall measures of quality in healthcare, rating the benchmarked outcomes of cardiothoracic surgery programs in the U.S.

The star rating is calculated using a combination of quality measures for specific procedures performed by an STS Adult Cardiac Surgery Database (ACSD) participant.

Health First’s team snagged the perfect rating for isolated AVRs for the rolling three years between July 2017 through June 2020, Dr. Campbell added.

A top score is hard to come by, so it puts Health First’s program at an elite level not only in the United States, but Canada, too.

“Only about 6% of programs could earn a three-star rating, so that puts us in a top tier of outcomes for AVR,” Dr. Campbell said.

THE HEALTH FIRST HEART & VASCULAR VALVE CLINIC’s comprehensive team at Holmes Regional Medical Center recently earned a three-star rating – the highest score possible – from the Society of Thoracic Surgeons for its patient outcomes in Aortic Valve Replacement procedures.

Team Approach All the Time

It’s an honor to be the hands that heal when it comes to ensuring your family’s healthcare journey the moment you arrive at our doors. More than anything, our Health First Heart and Vascular associates strive to be very in-depth and make sure nothing gets missed.

These same hands have also worked hard behind the scenes – where it takes an entire team to earn a highly regarded overall measure of quality healthcare in cardiothoracic surgery.

However, the process is far from easy. It’s extremely rigorous and involves documentation – a lot of it. Each patient has more than 800 pieces of information, and every page is sent into specific databases, which then compile the outcomes for all programs.

The process is always a “team approach, all the time, including our PAs, my other partners, and everybody on staff, including the OR and the ICU,” Dr. Campbell said.

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Nothing is missed, and everything gets critiqued from two STS nurses (previous RNs), who take on this massive document undertaking.

“They input every piece of data for every patient we treat, which is more than 600 cases per year,” Dr. Campbell said.

“They’re constantly going through every chart, every patient, and pulling out all the data and inputting it into the national database. Then, the national database crunches the numbers and sends us back reports the same time as they are putting the numbers in. This is a way for us to watch our own data on a short-term basis so we can meet and pick up trends and adjust what we’re doing if need be to help things out.”

This rating is a true testament to the fact that we’re always here for your overall, comprehensive specialty care.

Providing the highest-quality care to patients undergoing minimally invasive procedures, from planning to paying attention to every little detail, is important to us – and our approach doesn’t comprise care at all.

To learn more about Health First’s full suite of heart and vascular services, or to take a quick quiz to find out if you are at risk for heart disease, visit HF.org/Heart, or call to schedule a virtual or in-office appointment, 321.434.3131.

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