HERSHEY, Pa. — Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center has become the first hospital in Pennsylvania to be accredited for its Epilepsy and Critical Care Electroencephalogram (EEG) Monitoring Programs.
The Electroencephalogram (EEG) Lab received a five-year accreditation for outstanding management of its monitoring programs, patient safety, adherence to practice standards and use of the latest technology. The American Board of Registration of Electroencephalographic and Evoked Potential Technologists (ABRET) Long-Term Monitoring (LTM) Laboratory Accreditation Board, a nonprofit credentialing organization, granted the accreditation after evaluating the programs for the past year.
The Milton S. Hershey Medical Center is one of just 26 medical facilities in the U.S. to earn the accreditation. The closest ABRET-accredited centers in the Northeast are the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
This recognition follows ABRET’s previous five-year accreditation of the Hershey Medical Center EEG Lab for the technical quality of routine EEGs. For the past decade, the EEG Lab has also achieved Level 4 accreditation― the highest level available ― from the National Association of Epilepsy Centers.
“These three important accreditations give our patients the assurance that they will receive the highest quality diagnostic testing at Hershey Medical Center’s EEG Lab and Epilepsy Monitoring Unit,” said Dr. Jayant Acharya, Epilepsy Division chief and director of the Clinical Neurophysiology Lab at Hershey Medical Center. “Continuous monitoring of epilepsy patients improves diagnostic accuracy and enables us to provide the appropriate acute and long-term treatment.”
The EEG Lab at Hershey Medical Center evaluates and treats approximately 3,500 patients suffering from seizures per year. Its 15 neurophysiology technologists and support staff includes seven registered EEG technologists and two with additional LTM certification.
An estimated 65 million people in the world, including approximately 3 million in the U.S., suffer from epilepsy, a neurological disorder that causes abnormal electrical activity in the brain and recurrent seizures. The condition can be present at birth or caused by a head injury, brain tumors or infectious diseases.