Primary Angioplasty Moving Forward

At New Milford Hospital

State Gives OK For Life-Saving, Emergency Heart Service

NEW MILFORD — The State of Connecticut’s Office of Health Care Access has granted New Milford Hospital’s (NMH) request to expand its interventional cardiology program to include emergency angioplasty. The state’s approval enables the hospital to begin plans to implement within a few months the only primary angioplasty program in Litchfield County.

By quickly restoring blood flow to the heart muscle during a heart attack, angioplasty has proven superior to thrombolysis (“clot-busting” drugs) in preventing death or the loss of normal heart function (congestive heart failure).

In collaboration with a renowned team of interventional cardiologists from its system partner, NewYork-Presbyterian (NYP), New Milford Hospital will offer experts who perform far more angioplasties each year than the minimum required for a quality program.

“Our patients will have the very best care, close to home,” says NMH CEO Richard Pugh. “The NYP cardiologists have been performing our cardiac catheterizations since we opened our cath lab, and will now provide emergency angioplasties, as well. NewYork-Presbyterian’s cardiology program is ranked by US News & World Report as seventh in the nation and first in the tri-state region.”

This development helps NMH fulfill its commitment to the western Connecticut and nearby New York communities it serves by bringing the highest level of both technological and clinical expertise to bear on the major medical concerns of its population.

Currently, residents of Litchfield County do not have local access to emergency angioplasty, now considered the standard of care for treating heart attacks. Since a majority of patients nationwide who experience a heart attack are taken to community hospitals, they are exposed to treatment delays and poorer clinical outcomes when they are then transferred to tertiary facilities for interventional care.

The longer the lag time before blood flow through obstructed arteries is restored, the less likely it is that the oxygen-starved heart muscle will recover, and the more likely a patient is to die or have a poorer quality of life. NMH has launched a number of other initiatives that are designed to improve heart health and increase both medical and community awareness of the hospital’s programs. These include:

éOngoing medical and community education programs heart disease, including prevention, diagnosis, and understanding the role of cardiac catheterization and other procedures

éThe Women’s HeartAdvantage program, which raises women’s awareness about signs and symptoms of heart disease and understanding their risk and how to reduce it

éA multidisciplinary heart disease prevention program, the only such program in this area

éThe first annual New Milford Hospital~NewYork-Presbyterian Regional Heart Center Cardiology Symposium, which featured updates in cardiovascular medicine with approximately 90 physicians attending from hospitals across the region.