Consumer Reports Recognizes St. Luke’s Cardiac Outcomes the Best in the Nation

In a recent Cardiac Surgery Success Rate report published in the May 2017 issue of Consumer Reports, St. Luke’s received “excellent” ratings for our coronary artery bypass surgery program and “as expected” complications.

• Best surgical technique
• Correct drug utilization

The methods used to derive these ratings have been endorsed by the National Quality Forum, a nonprofit organization that endorses consensus standards for measuring and publically reporting data. Five hundred hospitals nationwide agreed to participate and share data in this survey in order to enhance data transparency to improve health care outcomes. This rating report places St. Luke’s in the company of other esteemed nationally recognized hospitals such as Massachusetts General, Duke, Yale and Emory.

“We believe it is important to be transparent with our data,” says Donna Sabol, vice president and chief quality officer, St. Luke’s University Health Network. “Reporting data in a public forum makes us better. We’ve been doing it for more than 15 years. For St. Luke’s, it’s just part of fulfilling our obligation to let our patients and communities know that we stand behind and are proud of the high quality care that we deliver.”

“The Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS) data is the highest quality data available,” adds Stephen Olenchock, DO, chief of Cardiovascular Surgery for St. Luke's University Health Network and clinical associate professor of surgery, Temple Medical School. “It’s the gold standard. It validates that St. Luke’s delivers the highest level and highest quality of truly sophisticated care. Publicly reportable data gives you a real picture of true quality. It’s not a popularity contest like some other reports. And the fact that we consent to having our data published in Consumer Reports goes to how transparent we really are. It is a reflection of our mission and our values. We are directly accountable to the communities we serve, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.”