Subscriber Benefit
As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowCommunity Health Network will break ground this month on a $6.9 million, 4,600-square-foot expansion of its Indiana Heart Hospital, adding two operating rooms.
The new rooms will make it easier for Community surgeons to perform so-called hybrid procedures—in which problems in two veins are fixed in one surgery—as well as newer procedures closer to the heart.
And in Community’s long-range planning, the new facilities also might allow its surgeons to conduct neuro surgeries for stroke patients.
“We’re really building the room so we can do what we do better,” said Dr. Jeffrey Weinberger, a Community vascular surgeon who sees patients at the Indiana Heart Hospital.
The two operating rooms will add to the four the Indiana Heart Hospital currently has. Community intends to build out one operating room this year—with its first procedures expected in January—then build out the second one in the year or so after the first one opens.
The ORs will have movable X-ray machines, mounted from the ceiling, which will give Community surgeons the capacity for larger images of the patient and from different angles than is currently possible.
X-ray images allow for surgeons to conduct heart and vascular surgeries through a patient’s veins, rather than doing open-heart surgery. Right now, the Indiana Heart Hospital—and many others—uses a mobile X-ray machine called a C-arm.
The new X-ray equipment will also allow Community’s surgeons to conduct surgeries near the heart—without opening up a patient’s chest—because it can produce a constant, stable view of the surgery area by timing its images around a patient’s heartbeats.
The 210,000-square-foot Indiana Heart Hospital opened in 2003.
Please enable JavaScript to view this content.