Many hospitals could be doing better at meeting treatment guidelines.

In the first such “report card” of its kind, a select group of American hospitals rates a B- or C+ in the way they handle the most common kind of heart attack, according to a Cleveland Clinic researcher who headed the appraisal.

The analysis of treatment practices at some 300 U.S. hospitals reveals a large gap in cardiac care. But Deepak L. Bhatt, M.D., says that if the same hospitals had been graded by today’s treatment standards just five years ago, “the average would have been a D-.” The improvement reflects growing acceptance of findings from key studies in the late 1990s and of more recent cardiac-care guidelines from the American…

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