A significant population increase influenced this general acute care hospital to grow its service lines. Bill Fox provides the details.

Although the name may imply this hospital is focused only on cardiology, an influx of Katrina refugees and the consequent boom to its population has set Louisiana Heart Hospital on a mission of diversification. The community’s pre-Katrina population was in the range of 210,000. After the storm, that number increased to more than 300,000.

Bill Fox

“The physicians who started the hospital, along with their corporate partner MedCath, want to provide a higher level of quality healthcare focused on making sure patients are never inconvenienced,” Fox said. “When we bring patients to the hospital, we don’t make them conform to the hospital’s operations. We conform the hospital to accommodate patient needs.”

Patient consideration
Most hospitals house their radiology department and imaging services on the first floor. At LHH, the radiology department is on the same floor as the patient rooms so patients aren’t wheeled from floor to floor for their tests. In addition, because of the portability of the equipment, nearly 90% of the radiology tests patients require can be done in the comfort and privacy of their rooms. Each of this general acute care hospital’s 58 rooms is private, with private bathrooms and living space to accommodate patient families to encourage them to stay overnight in the room.

“When patient families are involved in learning about how to take care of the patients prior to their discharge, the patients are better cared for when they leave the hospital,” Fox said. “In turn, patients are less anxious about leaving our care, and we end up with shorter lengths of stay.”

According to a survey done by HealthGrades, a Colorado-based healthcare rating organization, LHH has the shortest lengths-of-stay average in the North Shore Lake Ponchartrain area. LHH was awarded the Coronary Artery Disease Initial Performance Achievement Award by the American Heart Association for its commitment to AHA’s Get with the Guidelines Program in 2006. The hospital is the first on the north shore, the fourth in Louisiana, and the 52nd nationwide out of 1,400 participating hospitals to receive the award. In May, the heart hospital received the AHA’s 2007 Annual Award, making LHH and another hospital in north Louisiana the only two hospitals in the state to achieve this distinction.

Hospitals who participate in the program provide patients with risk reduction therapies, such as cholesterol-lowering drugs, aspirin, ACE inhibitors, and beta-blockers, as well as weight management counseling, smoking cessation classes, and cardiac rehabilitation referrals, before they are discharged. By participating in and meeting the requirements of this voluntary program, LHH proved its dedication to the health and wellness of its community.

“Patients ask our staff, ‘Why didn’t someone tell me this 10 years ago after my first heart attack?’ Now they know what not to do. That’s the kind of mark LHH’s physicians and staff feel has been critical to make in our communities,” Fox said.

Earlier this year, LHH was also named one of the nation’s best acute care hospitals for quality by Total Benchmark Solution—a leading provider of benchmarking, decision support, and consulting services for healthcare providers—in addition to being ranked in the top 5% of all cardiac programs in the US by HealthGrades.

“Following Hurricane Katrina, we’ve continued to put the patient first by maintaining the same level of quality across the full spectrum of acute care services that enabled our cardiac care to be rated among the top 5% in the nation,” Fox said.

Focus on the future
Hurricane Katrina shut down seven major hospitals in the New Orleans area. As a result, LHH gained 58 new medical staff members, some of whom had previously worked with Fox. With the increase in the population and medical staff members, the administration realized it was time to investigate expanding volumes within some of the hospital’s other product lines. “We don’t want 70% of our business to be heart work; 40% is good,” Fox said. “We want to provide services for the entire array of general acute care services—short of pediatrics and obstetrics.”

The hospital already has a full-service ED, and Fox said the hospital’s nurse-patient ratio is stronger than others in the region. Looking forward, LHH’s administration is spending more time reevaluating areas the hospital previously considered secondary markets, looking at who and where those Katrina populations are now and where the physicians went that served them in New Orleans, and how they can let those physicians know what the hospital is planning, inviting them to be a part of it if they choose.

“The future of the hospital is being a good member of the community by listening to what our community members tell us they need,” Fox said. “We want to do more of what we’ve always done, bringing that same level of excellence and attention to quality to the other pieces of the business we do.”