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May 1, 2008

Woonsocket hospital ends open-heart surgery program

The Health Department is allowing Landmark Medical Center to close its heart-surgery program while continuing to offer angioplasty, effective June 1.

The decision marks the end of Landmark’s ambitious but unsuccessful effort to offer, in cooperation with a Boston hospital, a high-end medical service at the Woonsocket community hospital. Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center worked with Landmark to develop its heart-surgery program, which started three years ago. But the program never attracted enough patients to be financially viable.

The Health Department ruling, made late yesterday and announced this morning, grants Landmark a waiver from rules that require anyone offering angioplasty to also have a heart-surgery program as backup in emergencies. Angioplasty is a procedure in which doctors thread a slender tube into the heart to open clogged arteries. Landmark is now required to develop a relationship with a hospital that offers heart surgery and an ambulance company so patients can be quickly transferred in an emergency. Meanwhile, the hospital will maintain its ability to provide emergency heart surgery but is no longer doing elective heart surgeries, said spokesman Bill Fischer.

Landmark did only 80 open-heart surgeries last year. But its angioplasty program has been more successful, with close 400 last year, and with the waiver, that program can continue.

-- Journal medical writer Felice J. Freyer

Posted by Mike McKinney  at 11:20 AM | Permalink

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