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The Lutheran Hospital Emergency, the region’s only accredited Chest Pain Center, is designed to improve the consistency and quality of care provided to patients. Our expertise and commitment to quality patient care allows physicians to reduce time to treatment during the critical early stages of a heart attack, when treatments are most effective.
"Over the last four years Lutheran Hospital has developed protocols to expedite the process of getting patients with chest pain evaluated quickly and activating our system for catheterization laboratory treatment for those with heart attacks," said Steven Orlow, MD, Medical Director of the Lutheran Cardiac Catheterization Lab. "This experience served us well during our recent survey for accreditation as a Chest Pain Center. Now we are taking this knowledge and experience to the next step...the next era."
 To help improve outcomes for patients needing advanced cardiac care, Lutheran's helicopter, Lutheran Air focuses on flying heart patients to Lutheran for more advanced cardiac procedures. The majority of these flights are for heart attack patients needing quick access to the cardiac catheterization (cath) lab.
Editorials in major cardiology journals are calling for the development of a system of rapid transfer to centers capable of treating heart attacks in cardiac cath labs. Cardiologists are talking about hospitals developing chest pain centers in much the same way that trauma centers of years ago focused resources and expertise on trauma care. "Heart care is on the cusp of a new era now that six different U.S. and international studies involving 3,750 patients show the superiority of transferring patients to an experienced heart catheterization center for treatment of heart attack," says Orlow. "Fast transportation in this new era becomes the key to making good heart care great." According to medical journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, even with the increased time for transportation to a different hospital, patients transferred to and treated in a cath lab do better (fewer instances of death, second heart attack or stroke) than patients treated with a clot buster medication at the original hospital.
"Lutheran’s regional transport team has been developed over the years as a collaborative effort with Bluffton Regional Medical Center and Kosciusko Community Hospital as well as other regional facilities. Hospitals now have the option of calling out either air or ground transport for their patients," says B.P. House, MD, Medical Director for Lutheran Hospital Emergency Services. "If the weather grounds the helicopter, we have the MoICUs that can respond. It’s really the best of both worlds for physicians, patients and their families," he says.
Patients should always go to the closest hospital in times of emergencies.
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