The CVPH Medical Center cardiac unit has repeated its five-star rating of last year. What a tribute to such a young program to be declared as good as it gets.

The Champlain Valley Heart Center has been in business since 2005. In that time, it has ascended from the status of novice to the best in its field.

That rating comes from HealthGrades, the leading independent health-care-ratings organization in the nation. This is what HealthGrades' Web site has to say about the study:

"HealthGrades has released the 12th-annual HealthGrades Hospital Quality in America Study, which examined nearly 40 million Medicare hospitalization records for the years 2006, 2007 and 2008. The study looks at trends in mortality and complication rates and also provides the foundation for HealthGrades' quality ratings of procedures and diagnoses at each individual hospital.

"The largest annual study of patient outcomes at each of the nation's 5,000 non-federal hospitals found a wide gap in quality between the nation's best hospitals and all others.

"According to the study, patients at highly rated hospitals have a 52-percent lower chance of dying compared with the U.S. hospital average, a quality chasm that has persisted for the last decade even as mortality rates, in general, have declined."

That exhaustive examination has concluded that CVPH's Heart Center belongs in the top 5 percent in the nation for angioplasty procedures. It is ranked in the top 10 in the state for all cardiac services and for cardiology services and in the top five in the state for angioplasty. Those numbers earn the Heart Center a five-star rating, tops in the company's evaluation system.

Not only does HealthGrades look at records of millions of patients and 5,000 hospitals, it takes into account the condition of patients when they entered their respective hospitals. In other words, it even looks at how sick patients were when they were admitted in order to thoroughly evaluate how good a job the hospital really did.

Here's an interesting conclusion: If all hospitals performed as well as CVPH on the 17 procedures examined, 224,537 Medicare lives could potentially have been saved from 2006 through 2008.

A whimsical definition of an expert is "a guy from out of town." But, knowing the lengths to which HealthGrades has gone to compare the efficacies of hospitals nationwide and knowing how highly the company thought and continues to think of CVPH over the past couple of years, our question is this: Why would anybody with heart problems go to Albany or Burlington or anywhere else? The best care available is offered right here in Plattsburgh.