With February designated as American Heart Month, numerous events are planned that will offer everything from blood-pressure screenings to tips on how to maintain a healthy heart. FILE PHOTO The idioms are endless: Home is where the heart is. Bless your heart. Be young at heart. Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
Well, now is the perfect time for a heart-to-heart conversation.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, heart disease is the leading cause of death for both men and women. In recognition, February has been designated as American Heart Month.
“Each year, more than half a million Americans experience STelevation myocardial infarctions (STEMI), commonly known as heart attacks,” said Dr. Geralda Xavier, director of the Emergency Department at Raritan Bay Medical Center (RBMC), Old Bridge, and a board-certified emergency medicine physician. “The majority of people who have an out-ofhospital heart attack fail to receive appropriate treatment for their life-threatening conditions within nationally recommended time frames.”
Several area health care chains are advancing the use of technology to lessen the time it takes for a patient to be seen by a cardiac team and to ease the procedures if an emergency does exist.
RBMC’s Code Heart initiative reduces door-to-balloon (D2B) time — the crucial period between a heart attack patient’s arrival at a hospital and the time he or she receives lifesaving coronary intervention.
Paramedics are now transmitting real-time electrocardiograms (EKGs) that record and transmit the heart’s electrical activity from out-of-hospital locations to the hospital. Cardiac interventionists at the hospital review the same EKGs that the paramedic sees. Once the diagnosis is made that the patient has experienced a heart attack, a Code Heart is activated and RBMC’s cardiac catheterization lab team — led by the cardiac interventionist on call — prepares to go to work, even before the patient arrives at the emergency room.
“At our medical center, we believe in providing the latest in emergent and elective cardiology treatment for the community,” said Dr. Puneet Sahgal, a board-certified interventional cardiologist and medical director of the cardiac catheterization lab at RBMC.
By following Code Heart protocols, RBMC’s D2B median time improved from 78 minutes to 64 minutes between January and June 2014. The national benchmark is 90 minutes.
Also helping to reduce treatment time is the implementation of a new cardiology physician practice, Garden State Heart Care. With three qualified cardiologists, the practice will open this month in the new Medical Arts Building at the hospital’s campus on Route 18. The new building includes comprehensive outpatient and surgical services.
In the same vein, Bayshore Community Hospital in Holmdel recently unveiled its new Multi-Specialty Interventional Suite, outfitted with advanced technology capable of performing complex minimally invasive cardiovascular, endovascular and interventional radiology procedures.
According to Dr. Shaddy Younan, medical director of the cardiac catheterization laboratory at Bayshore, the D2B has been reduced to 45 minutes at the hospital.
Younan said he believes the statistics will improve further, considering that the interventional suite has only been operating for a matter of weeks.
“This new technology offers patients advanced diagnostic and therapeutic options in a comfortable setting,” he said. “The increased detail and clarity of this new technology now available at Bayshore means local residents won’t have to travel to receive high-quality care. The Bayshore team will now offer an enhanced experience for patients and the community.”
Younan said there are close to 1 million catheterizations and angioplasties done each year in the United States. Bayshore receives around 60 heart attack patients annually who require an emergency procedure once admitted.
The new suite at Bayshore allows professionals from various departments —surgeons, radiologists and cardiologists — to work together in one technologically advanced space to make the procedure less invasive for the patient.
“If a surgeon starts a procedure and realizes he needs to switch procedures, he has the capability to do so in the new room,” Younan said.
This is especially critical for anesthesiologists, who previously had to move their equipment to different rooms, he said.
In addition, Younan said the new suite uses advanced equipment, such as an intravascular ultrasound to see blockages better; optical coherence tomography, which is similar to infrared technology used to see 3- D images inside the artery at a high level of detail; a new type of angiography that replicates all angles of the heart using one injection of a small amount of dye, instead of the former way of separate dye injections to achieve separate angles; and better software that reconstructs 3-D images to fix aneurysms in a shorter amount of time and makes biopsy imaging easier for radiologists.
“From my perspective, obviously no one wants to come in for a procedure. But you want it to be as positive an experience as you can,” Younan said.