HUP receives advanced stroke certification

After undergoing an on-site review, the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania recently became the first center in Philadelphia to receive the Advanced Certification for Comprehensive Stroke Centers from the Joint Commission and the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association.

Among the requirements for the certification are advanced imaging capabilities, around-the-clock specialized treatment and unique and competent staff.

“This is an objective mark of our quality and commitment to patients with stroke,” said Director of the Comprehensive Stroke Center at HUP Scott Kasner.

The Comprehensive Stroke Center Certification was derived in part from the work of Richard Zorowitz. Prior to his work at Johns Hopkins University, Zorowitz served as medical director of Inpatient Rehabilitation and director of Stroke Rehabilitation at HUP.

“In the mid 90s, a group of physicians in Philadelphia were interested in organizing stroke care and making it a hub-and-spoke kind of system where you would have major centers that would be the hubs and the spokes that may not do everything but can feed into the hubs or do some of their own stroke care as well,” Zorowitz said.

He is looking forward to patients benefiting from the comprehensive stroke care that HUP provides.

“It’s going be one of a number of hospitals in the city and in the state that are going to be the hubs for doing advanced stroke care,” he said. “It will allow patients to come in and get the advanced stroke care — not just [tissue plasminogen activator], which is the clot-busting drug — but also surgeries and all types of technology that actually might help to work on stroke.”

This is not the first time that HUP has been recognized for its complex stroke care. HUP’s stroke center, which was founded in 1994, received designation as a Primary Stroke Center by the Joint Commission in 2004.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.