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Cardiac Services

Lake Hospital System’s Center for Cardiac Health

Did you know that heart disease is the number one health problem in the US and in Lake County? That’s why Lake Hospital System’s Center for Cardiac Health offers a comprehensive program for residents of Lake County and surrounding areas. From emergency intervention to diagnostics, treatment, and rehabilitation, we bring advanced cardiac services close to home.

What's more, in December 1997 Lake Hospital System partnered with The Cleveland Clinic -- world renown for cardiac services - to establish the only cardiac surgery program between Cuyahoga County, Ohio and Erie, Pennsylvania.

The Center for Cardiac Health, in conjunction with The Cleveland Clinic Open Heart Surgery Program, is home to some of the best and brightest medical professionals. Professionals you can count on to give you sound advice, expert care, and the attention you and your family want.

Prevention

At the Center for Cardiac Health, our first goal is to help you avoid heart disease altogether. We host a number of community activities aimed at prevention like early intervention and education programs in the public schools, employment fitness testing and free community screenings.

We also developed the  Women's Heart Initiative to teach women how to prevent heart disease and how to recognize when a heart attack is occurring, since the symptoms can be different for women than for men.

Early Diagnosis and Heart Attack Intervention

Close to 1.5 million Americans suffer a heart attack each year; 45% of those affect people under age 65. Thanks to Lake Hospital System’s optimal diagnostics and emergency intervention procedures, we can treat the early signs of a heart attack. Our diagnostic services include:

• Cardiac catheterization
• Echocardiography
• Electrocardiography
• Cardiac electrophysiology
• Stress testing
• Holter monitoring

Our emergency intervention techniques include:

• Rapid diagnostics
• Enzyme testing
• Clot-dissolving drugs
• State-of-the-art angioplasty

Treating Heart Disease

If you need treatment for heart disease, you can feel confident that Lake Hospital System offers the latest lifesaving technology and procedures. These include:

• Balloon angioplasty
• Coronary artery bypass surgery
• Valve repair and replacement
• Minimally invasive surgery
• Minimally invasive vein harvesting
• Off-pump "beating heart" surgery
• Aortic aneurysm surgery

Cardiac Electrophysiology

As part of the comprehensive cardiovascular treatment provided here at Lake Hospital System, cardiac electrophysiology (EP) is both a diagnostic and an early intervention measure that can not only take an extremely accurate picture of the heart to diagnose arrhythmias, but also provide catheter-based treatments like ablation, pacemaker implants and defribrillator implants.

Getting on with Your Life

We help you adjust to living with heart disease through our three-phase cardiac rehabilitation program. The first segment takes place within days of your heart attack or surgery, while you’re still in the hospital. It focuses on education about heart disease and helps you come to terms with your diagnosis.

Phase two includes exercise while wearing a heart monitor to help assess the heart’s response to exertion. To help you make lifestyle changes that last forever, this phase also includes lectures on nutrition, cholesterol, and other cardiovascular topics. In phase three, you exercise on your own. You can do that at our rehab facility, at home, at the mall, or at a health club. Regardless of where you exercise, our staff is always available to offer guidance and answer questions.

We also offer a chapter of Mended Hearts, a national support group that helps patients and their families come to terms with their disease. Our chapter meets monthly, rotating between LakeEast Hospital in Painesville and LakeWest Hospital in Willoughby.

Results

Our unique style of care - which combines compassion, communication and cardiac excellence - has made quite an impression on our patients. Satisfaction with our services and physicians is consistently high. And our mortality and complications outcomes for angioplasty, open heart surgery, heart attacks, and congestive heart failure not only compare favorably with leading medical institutions across the country, they earned us the ranking as a 100 Top Hospital* for cardiovascular care in 2003 and 2007.

To view Lake Hospital System cardiologists, click here , then choose "Cardiology" in the Search by Specialty option.

*Source: Solucient 2003, Thomson 2007 

“We're proud of our surgical results at LakeWest Hospital, which are comparable to or better than those of large institutions,” points out Rami Akhrass, MD, a Cleveland Clinic cardiothoracic surgeon who performs open heart surgery at LakeWest Hospital. “In fact, our mortality and complication rates for bypass surgery are significantly lower than the national standards set by the Society of Thoracic Surgeons.”