Achievement Award for 2009 - one of only 121 hospitals nationwide and one of 5 in California to do so. The award recognizes CMH's commitment and success in implementing a higher standard of care for heart attack patients, and signifies that CMH has reached an aggressive goal of treating coronary artery disease patients with 85 percent compliance to core standard levels of care outlined by the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association clinical guidelines and recommendations.

Created by the merger of the American College of Cardiology Foundation's NCDR ACTION Registry and the American Heart Association's Get With The Guidelines-CAD program, ACTION Registry-GWTG combines the best of both programs into a single, unified national registry.

To receive the Gold Performance Achievement Award, CMH consistently followed the treatment guidelines in ACTION Registry-GWTG for 24 consecutive months. These include aggressive use of medications like cholesterol-lowering drugs, beta-blockers, ACE inhibitors, aspirin, and anticoagulants in the hospital. "The American College of Cardiology Foundation and the American Heart Association commend Community Memorial Hospital for its success in implementing standards of care and protocols," said Dr. Christopher Cannon, ACTION Registry-GWTG Steering Committee Chairperson and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Associate Physician in the Cardiovascular Division at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

"The full implementation of acute and secondary prevention guideline-recommended therapy is a critical step in saving the lives and improving outcomes of heart attack patients," added Dr. Gregg C. Fonarow, ACTION Registry- GWTG Steering Committee Vice- Chairperson and Director of Ahmanson-UCLA Cardiomyopathy Center.

"The time is right for Community Memorial Hospital to be focused on improving the quality of cardiovascular care by implementing ACTION Registry-GWTG. The number of acute myocardial infarction patients eligible for treatment is expected to grow over the next decade due to increasing incidence of heart disease and a large aging population," said Rick Porterfield, Cath Lab Director at Community Memorial Hospital.

With the collective strengths of these two programs, ACTION Registry-GWTG empowers health care provider teams to consistently treat heart attack patients according to the most current, science-based guidelines; and establishes a national standard for understanding and improving the quality, safety, and outcomes of care provided for patients with coronary artery disease.