Sacred Heart forms new heart institute.

Byline: Tim Christie The Register-Guard

On Tuesday morning, Dr. David Duke, in coat and tie, announced the establishment of the Oregon Heart & Vascular Institute, a new interdisciplinary program for delivering cardiovascular care at Sacred Heart Medical Center.

In the afternoon, he was back in his scrubs in the operating room, cracking a chest and performing open heart surgery to repair a leaky valve and irregular heartbeat in a 61-year-old man.

Duke is executive medical director of the new institute, which brings together four related medical specialties - heart surgery, vascular surgery, cardiology and interventional radiology - to determine the best course of treatment for patients suffering from heart or vascular disease. The institute also will use cutting-edge scientific research into cardiovascular disease being conducted at the University of Oregon.

"While the medicine that each of these specialties represents occurs every day around the nation and the world, the way we plan on delivering it represents the next generation of medical care," Duke said.

The institute will function as a hospital within a hospital at Sacred Heart and serve as a one-stop shop for heart and vascular care in the region.

Patients will gain by being able to call one number to reach a team of physicians and health professionals dedicated to heart care, organizers say. They'll benefit also because institute leaders plan to intensively track and report the outcomes of treatments as part of an effort to improve the quality of care.

The institute "will not just meet the standard, but rather define the standard of quality care in cardiovascular disease," Duke said.

The hospital has the third-highest volume of open-heart surgeries in the Northwest and the second-highest in Oregon. Numerous studies have shown that doctors and hospitals that do more procedures have better outcomes, said Alan Yordy, chief executive officer for PeaceHealth in Oregon. PeaceHealth, based in Bellevue, Wash., is the corporate parent of Sacred Heart.

"Volume matters, and the number of cases you do every year matters in the delivery of health care," he said.

The institute's partnership with the University of Oregon marks the first formal collaboration between the two downtown neighbors. Such partnerships are more typical between a medical school and a teaching hospital, said university President Dave Frohnmayer.

The UO does not have a medical school, but its researchers in the Department of Human Physiology will collaborate with physicians to determine ways to apply their research to clinical practice.

"In that respect we are all looking at 21st century medicine, and the new ways in which fundamental research, education and outreach interact with clinical care of the first rank," Frohnmayer said.

Chris Minson, co-director of the UO's Exercise and Environmental Physiology labs, is working with local cardiologists to better understand a procedure known as EECP - enhanced external counterpulsation - used to treat patients with heart disease.

Doctors know EECP works to improve blood vessel functioning for some cardiac patients, but they don't know why. Minson, whose research focuses on the tiny blood vessels coursing through human skin, is running tests on EECP patients before and after the procedure to see if he can figure out how and why they show improvement.

The new institute will promote these types of projects, Minson said, "simply because we're going to have people like me, who have time to do the science but don't have access to patients, and physicians, who have access to patients and have good ideas but don't have time to do the science."

Doctors have been delivering heart care at Sacred Heart since 1966, with the first open-heart surgery performed in 1971. The hospital established the Oregon Heart Center in 1984. In 1999 and 2002, Sacred Heart was listed as one of the top 100 hospitals in the nation for cardiovascular care.

Cardiologists in the cardiac catheterization lab perform about 2,000 procedures a year, such as insertion of drug-eluting stents. Surgeons perform about 750 open-heart surgeries a year.

On Tuesday, Duke repaired a leaky mitral valve and performed a maze procedure, an operation to fix a rapid, irregular heartbeat, which the hospital began doing last year.

He cut into the upper valves of the heart and used a cauterizer to burn a series of scars into it. The network of scar tissue controls electrical impulses that cause the irregular heartbeat, known as atrial fibrillation.

The institute will be housed on Sacred Heart's first floor for now and will move to Springfield when PeaceHealth opens its new hospital at RiverBend.

HEART DISEASE

Heart disease and stroke - the principal components of cardiovascular disease - are the first and third leading causes of death for both men and women in the United States, accounting for nearly 40 percent of all deaths.

More than 930,000 Americans die of cardiovascular disease each year, which amounts to one death every 34 seconds.

But death is only part of the picture: More than 64 million Americans - almost one-fourth of the population - live with cardiovascular disease.

Coronary heart disease is a leading cause of premature, permanent disability in the U.S. work force. Stroke alone accounts for disability among more than 1 million Americans. More than 6 million hospitalizations each year are due to cardiovascular disease.

- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 

CAPTION(S):

Dr. David Duke performs open-heart surgery on Tuesday at Sacred Heart Medical Center in Eugene. He announced a new interdisciplinary approach to delivering cardiovascular care with the formation of the Oregon Heart & Vascular Institute.