DECATUR - Decatur Memorial Hospital announced Monday that its Brain and Stroke Center has received Primary Stroke Center Certification and the Gold Seal of Approval from the Joint Commission, a national, independent accrediting organization for health care organizations. The announcement came to the hospital Friday following an on-site review visit by the Joint Commission in February.

According to a hospital news release, the certification is based on the American Stroke Association's statements and guidelines for stroke care and the Brain Attack Coalition's recommendations for primary stroke centers.

With 190 to 200 hospitals statewide, DMH became one of about 20 with the designation and did so ahead of hospitals in Champaign and Springfield, DMH President and CEO Ken Smithmier said at a news conference Monday. He emphasized that the certification came after two years of work on the part of the hospital's stroke team to identify and implement a system of protocols for quick and accurate patient care.

"Like with heart attacks, dealing with patients with acute strokes, time matters," Smithmier said. "And without the system in place and functioning, it doesn't make much difference."

If a stroke can be diagnosed within a reasonable time frame, it can potentially be stopped or its damaging effects reversed with clot-busting medications or other interventional treatments available at DMH, the center's medical director Dr. Oliver Dold, a neurosurgeon, said.

Dold and his colleague on the stroke team, Dr. Baljit Deol, a neurointerventional radiologist, emphasized that an essential part of the success of these treatments at DMH is the stroke team's multidisciplinary approach.

Smithmier said with the certification in place, the hospital will work to ensure that the quality of its stroke center remains current with Joint Commission standards. Another focus of the hospital's efforts will now be community stroke education.

The team faced a real-life test Friday when two women having strokes came into the DMH emergency room at virtually the same time, Smithmier said. Both were treated according to the protocols and had reversal of their symptoms, Karen Schneller, administrative director of DMH's Emergency Care Center, said.

"Before we would have just watched the symptoms evolve," Schneller said of the way strokes were treated years ago. "And we would know that (the patients) would live with a lifelong disability."

Annie Getsinger can be reached at agetsinger@herald-review.com or 421-6968.