Quality/Equality

Transforming Cardiac Care

In Detroit, Expecting Success helped turn around a community-based teaching hospital.

Published: July 17, 2008

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Transforming Cardiac Care

Expecting Success

Hundreds of research studies have documented that patients from certain racial and ethnic groups are more likely to receive lower quality health care. These gaps in treatment, commonly referred to as racial and ethnic disparities, persist across a range of health care services used to treat different conditions. The evidence of disparities was especially striking in the diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular disease.

Expecting Success, an initiative of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is aimed at improving cardiac care for racial and ethnic minority populations in the United States.

Detroit's Sinai-Grace Hospital is one of 10 general acute care hospitals selected for the Expecting Success program on a competitive basis. Sinai-Grace is participating in a 29-month long collaborative process to improve the quality of care for African Americans and Latinos with cardiovascular disease.

Participation in Expecting Success has been transformative for Sinai-Grace, a hospital seeking to improve care and build its standing in the community.

"All along the way, the hospital got better," Conrad L. Mallett Jr., President, Sinai-Grace Hospital, said. "All along the way, people inside the hospital began to have a better attitude about themselves because we were able to show the community, show our board, that the work that we were involved in was equal to or better than a great many important hospital facilities in the entire country."