Dan Webb did his best to ignore the pain in his chest.

"For quite a while I wanted to get checked out," he said, "but I was kinda busy. I guess I didn’t want to admit it was serious."

The pains got worse on opening day of hunting season, when he dragged his deer back to his truck. He didn’t tell his wife that he fell down in the driveway when he came home from hunting. He even tried to dissuade his daughter from calling 9-1-1 when he fell again a few minutes later in the family’s Medford home.

"I just thought I was overly tired," the 50-year-old backhoe operator recalled. "I didn’t know I was having a heart attack."

Webb’s name almost certainly would have been added to the long list of heart attack deaths if his daughter, Natasha, hadn’t called for an ambulance. He was rushed to Rogue Valley Medical Center, where cardiologists opened a coronary artery that was completely blocked.

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Two weeks later, he was back at work. Having survived his heart attack, he’ll become part of a different statistical record — one that has brought Rogue Valley Medical Center repeated national recognition for cardiac care.

RVMC has been named a Top 100 Cardiac Hospital for 2005 by Solucient, an Illinois -based hospital information company that studied the records of more than 6,000 U.S. hospitals and 12 million patients to determine which hospitals had the best patient outcomes.

RVMC has now made the list of top cardiac-care hospitals five times. It’s one of just 20 hospitals that have made the grade in five of the seven years that Solucient has studied the data.

"It’s hard to hit these benchmarks and even harder to keep hitting them," said Jeanne Chenoweth, Solucient’s senior vice president for performance improvement. "Everybody sees the benchmarks and tries to exceed them."

Among its Top 100, Solucient cites 30 community hospitals as well as 40 teaching hospitals with cardiovascular residency programs and 40 teaching hospitals without cardiovascular residency programs.

Hospitals are rated on a number of criteria, including mortality rate, length of hospital stay, cost and complication-free care.

To be considered, a hospital must treat a broad spectrum of cardiology patients, including those who have congestive heart failure and heart attack, as well as those who have full-blown heart surgery or less invasive procedures such as balloon angioplasty (in which a clogged artery is opened by inserting a thin wire into a vein in the leg and guiding it to the blocked artery, where a balloon is inflated).

RVMC is the only hospital in Southern Oregon that performs all the procedures that Solucient evaluates. Providence Medford Medical Center and Ashland Community Hospital were excluded from the study because they do not perform the full range of procedures that were measured.

Mortality rates at RVMC are significantly below national rates in part because of a treatment protocol worked out by regional hospitals, physicians and ambulance services.

Ambulance companies transport people with heart-attack symptoms directly to RVMC rather than the nearest hospital emergency department because RVMC offers the region’s broadest range of cardiac services.

The time saved translates directly into lives saved as well as heart muscle preserved, said Dr. Brian Gross, one of the cardiologists who developed the protocol. Blocked coronary arteries deprive the heart muscle of blood, and the longer they stay blocked, the more likely that part of the heart muscle will die.

Gross noted that during the program’s first 18 months, 233 heart attack patients were treated at RVMC. Overall mortality for those 233 cases was 2.1 percent. That compares to 8.6 percent mortality at local hospitals in 2001 and 11 percent for hospitals of comparable size across the United States.

Among those 233 patients were 81 who were identified in the field and transported to RVMC by paramedics who alerted the hospital to mobilize the cardiac care team. Physicians and their support staff were ready to treat those patients as soon as they were wheeled into the hospital.

None of the 81 died.

"We didn’t expect (the improvement in mortality rates) to be this good," Gross said. "Generally when you make changes in mortality (rates) you drop the death rate by about one-half of one percent."

Gross hopes to present a paper on the program at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology next March. He stressed that its success can be traced to an "unusually cooperative medical community that’s large enough to pull it off with depth and talent and small enough to maintain the relationships that enhance success.

"It’s a local success story we hope will impact the way acute heart attacks are cared for around country in the coming years."

Back at work on his backhoe, Webb knows he’s a lucky man. "One thing I learned, when your body starts telling you there’s something wrong, you listen and you don’t put it off, especially if you get little pains in your chest."

Reach reporter Bill Kettler at 776-4492, or e-mail bkettler@mailtribune.com.