Primary Percutaneous Coronary Intervention for STEMI: How Important Are Hospitals' Procedure Volumes?

Guidelines recommend that at hospitals offering primary percutaneous coronary intervention for patients with ST-segment-elevation MI, at least 36 such procedures — and at least 200 angioplasties — should be performed per year. To assess the association between volume of primary PCI and patient outcomes, investigators identified 29,513 patients hospitalized for STEMI who underwent primary PCI at 166 hospitals participating in the American Heart Association's Get With The Guidelines quality-improvement registry from 2001 through 2007.

The participating hospitals' annual primary PCI volumes ranged from 9 to 224 and were characterized as high (>70), medium (36–70), or low (<36). Sixty-five percent of hospitals met the guideline recommendation of…