Hospital to build heart surgery facilities.

Byline: Tim Christie The Register-Guard

SPRINGFIELD - As early as July, surgeons could be cracking chests and cutting on hearts for the first time at McKenzie-Willamette Medical Center.

The hospital is preparing to build a $5.4 million, 11,700-square-foot open heart surgery suite and post-operation unit, spokeswoman Rosie Pryor said Thursday. The unit should open some time in the third quarter of 2006 and do about 200 surgeries a year, she said.

Heart surgery has never been offered at McKenzie-Willamette, which opened in 1955 as Springfield's community hospital. Its larger rival, Sacred Heart Medical Center in Eugene, has been doing heart surgeries since 1971.

But McKenzie-Willamette officials said they intended to get into the heart surgery business when they opened a $2.2 million cardiac catheterization laboratory in December 2004.

In a cardiac cath lab, doctors can diagnose and treat heart disease by threading a long slender tube - a catheter - into an artery or vein in an arm or leg and sliding it into the heart or coronary arteries.

But cardiologists have been doing only diagnostic work at McKenzie-Willamette's cath lab because medical protocol recommends against doing cath lab interventions, or treatments, without having surgical backup available.

Once the surgical unit is open, cardiologists can start treating heart disease in the cath lab, Pryor said.

Heart doctors have been asking McKenzie-Willamette to get into the heart business for a decade, but it wasn't until the hospital merged with Triad Hospitals Inc., the nation's third-largest for-profit hospital system, did it have the cash to spend on costly equipment, Pryor said.

Pryor said the hospital decided to move ahead with the heart unit even though it expects to be moving into a brand new facility in the next few years because the need for additional cardiac care exists now in the community.

The equipment, valued at about $2 million, can be moved to the new hospital when it opens, Pryor said.

Cardiac care also is a profitable specialty for hospitals and doctors, experts say.

Heart disease is the No. 1 killer in the United States, accounting for some 950,000 deaths each year, or about 40 percent of all deaths. About 61 million Americans - one in four - have some form of cardiovascular disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

One issue yet to be resolved is who will be performing heart surgery at McKenzie-Willamette. The only heart surgeons in the community are employees of rival PeaceHealth, parent corporation of Sacred Heart.

Pryor said the surgeons have said they want to practice at McKenzie-Willamette, and McKenzie-Willamette officials have had initial conversations with PeaceHealth about having their surgeons practice at the Springfield hospital.

Doctors at Cardiovascular Surgical Associates could not be reached for comment Thursday, nor could a PeaceHealth spokesman.

The heart suite will be located on the first floor of the hospital, in the space where the women's health and birth center used to be. A garden courtyard also will be built on and be part of the unit.

The new unit will have one operating room, four intensive care beds and four post-op beds, Pryor said.

Contractors have removed asbestos from the space, and construction is expected to begin in three to four weeks, said John Wood, the hospital's plant operations director.

John Hyland Construction Inc. is the general contractor for the expansion project.