Westchester Medical Center last month received the go-ahead to become a destination heart therapy center, using heart-assisting devices either to buy more time until a transplantable heart is available or to provide more options for late-term cardio care.
The new “destination therapy” designation from the Joint Commission on Healthcare Accreditations ”“ called simply the Joint Commission ”“ followed a rigorous evaluation and led to certification for the “mechanical circulatory support” program. Mechanical circulatory support devices, sometimes referred to as “ventricular assist” or “heart assist” devices, provide short- or long-term support when hearts are too damaged or diseased to provide adequate circulation, the hospital reports, noting, “The devices can be used short term as a bridge to recovery allowing a patient”™s heart to rest after a heart attack or heart surgery. For those people who are on the waiting list to receive a heart transplant, more recently these devices have been seen as a bridge to transplantation, providing an increased quality of life, an improvement in the patient”™s health and most importantly, time. ?“While WMC has implanted many assist devices for patients awaiting cardiac transplant, the significance of Joint Commission certification is that it permits WMC to implant devices for long-term support, allowing WMC to offer many more heart-failure patients an alternative for end-stage cardiac disease.?“The technology behind today”™s mechanical circulatory support devices has significantly improved over the last few years to become a very practical and therapeutic option for the treatment of advanced chronic heart failure.”
The program will be run by Dr. David Spielvogel, director; Dr. Alan Gass, medical director; and Dr. Warren Rosenblum, associate director.
Once the stuff of international headlines, WMC doctors since 2007 have performed 29 heart transplants.
In all its units, the center treats some 120,000 patients per year.
