Baptist Health Lexington Receives Chest Pain Center Reaccreditation

2008 - Baptist Health Lexington has received a three-year reaccreditation from the Society of Chest Pain Centers, an international professional society focused on improving care for patients with acute coronary syndromes and related maladies.

Baptist Health Lexington was the first hospital in Central Kentucky to be designated a Chest Pain Center by the Society of Chest Pain Centers in 2005. The recent reaccreditation comes with a new, higher-level designation, Chest Pain Center with PCI, which stands for Percutaneous Catheter Intervention. The PCI designation denotes that Central Baptist meets or exceeds benchmarks for rapidly diagnosing an acute heart attack, proceeding with a heart catheterization and intervening with appropriate treatment.

The Chest Pain Center’s protocol driven and systematic approach to patient management allows physicians to reduce time to treatment during the critical early stages of a heart attack, when treatments are most effective, and to better monitor patients when it is not clear whether they are having a coronary event. Such observation helps ensure that a patient is neither sent home too early nor needlessly admitted.