10 Years of the Gill Affiliate Network: Appalachian Regional Healthcare
The Gill Heart & Vascular Institute Affiliate Network launched in 2014 to better connect community hospitals across the Commonwealth with the expertise and resources available at UK HealthCare. Throughout 2024, UK HealthCare is highlighting achievements by the 23 members of the Gill Affiliate Network as part of the network’s 10th anniversary celebration.
Eight members of Appalachian Regional Healthcare (ARH), a not-for-profit health system serving more than 400,000 residents across Eastern Kentucky and Southern West Virginia, have joined the Gill Affiliate Network. They are: Harlan ARH Hospital, Hazard ARH Regional Medical Center, Highlands ARH Regional Medical Center, Mary Breckenridge ARH Hospital, McDowell ARH Hospital, Middlesboro ARH Hospital, Tug Valley ARH Regional Medical Center, and Whitesburg ARH Hospital.
What are key aspects of your cardiovascular program that people should know about?
Just a few of the cardiovascular services we provide to the communities we serve include:
- Cardiac MRI
- Cardiac CT
- Electrophysiology
- Four cardiac cath labs (three of those are STEMI receiving)
Highlands ARH is Chest Pain Accredited, and we are working to get Hazard ARH accredited as well. We just rolled out Get With The Guidelines – Coronary Artery Disease in all fourteen of our hospitals.
ARH, in partnership with our communities, looks forward to expanding and aggressively growing our cardiovascular services to improve health and promote well-being of everyone in Central Appalachia.
How has your relationship with the Gill Affiliate Network helped your mission?
Being a part of the Gill Heart Affiliate has shown our community we are invested in providing quality cardiac care to the patients of Eastern Kentucky. We have worked diligently with Gill to build a cardiac quality dashboard to help us identify improvement opportunities and improve cardiac services.
The relationship has allowed us to improve our electrophysiology department by enabling our APRN to attend a mini-fellowship, where she was able to expand her knowledge in heart failure. Gill helped train our cardiac abstractors in pulling data for our National Cardiovascular Data Registry and improved their understanding of the metrics. Additionally, support from the network in developing a Heart Failure Emergency Room Discharge Protocol has allowed us to implement a heart failure clinic serving our patients in Floyd County and Johnson County.
These are just a few examples of the educational and training opportunities offered by the Gill Affiliate Network. Opportunities like those have allowed us to grow local expertise in cardiac care and enhance the level of treatments available to our patient population.
What are your cardiovascular program’s goals, and how can the Gill Affiliate Network help you meet them?
We want to continue to enhance our cardiovascular service line and provide high quality care to our patients. We want to provide heart care close to home, because where you live shouldn’t dictate or impede the quality of care that you receive.
We know that the Gill Affiliate Network will continue being an excellent partner in seeing that patients in Eastern Kentucky and Southern West Virginia are treated with the utmost respect.
