NYU Langone Health has the lowest heart attack patient mortality rate in the United States at nearly half of the national average — which directors at the hospital’s cardiology programs attribute to accommodating socioeconomic disparities in patients.
Using data from July 2020 through June 2023, the federal agency Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services found that NYU Langone had a heart attack mortality rate of 7.7%, compared to a national benchmark of 13.7%. The mortality rate is calculated based on deaths of Medicare patients 65 years and older within 30 days after hospital admission for a heart attack.
Sunil Rao, director of the medical center’s Cardiac Catheterization Laboratory and the interventional cardiology department, said that the hospital can effectively respond to heart attacks by prioritizing the minimization of racial and gender disparities in care. Rao said that taking environmental factors like geography and food access into account is a critical step in designing treatment plans.
“It’s about making sure that that disease process is treated in such a way that is really focused on not only the best outcomes but is also consistent with the patient’s cultural values and their background,” Rao said in an interview with WSN. “That’s really the secret sauce.”
Albert Jung, the director of the Inpatient Cardiology Consultation Services at NYU Langone, said he has worked over the last decade to form a team of inpatient cardiologists with intensive care unit training who can perform immediate cardiology assessments. Jung said that this represented a substantial improvement from when he started working at the medical center and consultations would take hours to arrange.
“That’s a really big thing and a unique aspect of NYU,” Jung said. “The enormously high standard for cardiology programs among us — emergency rooms, the cath lab, heart failure services — has really expanded in a huge way.”
NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, another New York City hospital, averaged a 9.5% 30-day mortality rate. In a U.S. News evaluation of cardiology programs nationwide, NYU Langone ranked second while the city’s Mount Sinai Hospital ranked fourth and NewYork-Presbytarian ranked fifth.
Jung said that NYU Langone has improved by implementing cardiology mortality review sessions across the medical center’s campuses, where teams of doctors review fatal heart attack cases to determine what went wrong. According to Rao, the medical also emphasizes transitional care to prevent further complications by explaining all medications to family members, scheduling follow-up appointments and controlling risk factors.
“I’m trying to put myself out of business,” Rao said. “I don’t want to see that patient come back to the hospital with another heart attack.”
Contact Audrey Abrahams at [email protected].
