ESCANABA, Mich. (WZMQ) – A new laboratory at Escanaba’s OSF St. Francis Hospital is helping patients get life-saving care close to home.
OSF has opened a cardiac catheterization lab in partnership with Bellin Health’s cardiovascular team. The lab offers high-end care that includes pacemaker placement, defibrillators, loop recorders, and diagnostic angiograms.
“We can look at all of the blood vessels of the heart and note if there are any areas that need fixing,” said lab director Dr. Sumit Ringwala.
Thanks to the partnership between OSF and Bellin, he says patients can get much of the care they need right in Escanaba, decreasing the need for travel and allowing them to be treated by the same cardiologists.
“I can come here, do a diagnostic heart catheterization, and if it needs to be fixed, we can fix it back at Bellin Hospital,” Dr. Ringwala explained. “The same cardiologist will do the diagnostic angiogram as well as the fix. Also, if we have something high-end like a valve replacement at Bellin, we can get the follow-up imaging here, so you don’t have to go back to Green Bay so many times. You can get a lot of care locally.”
According to Dr. Ringwala, many of the procedures available at the cardiac catheterization lab were not previously available in this part of the state.
“There’s a lot of people in all areas of rural healthcare that, because they don’t want to travel, decide to say, ‘You know what? I’m just going to live with it.'” he said. “‘I’m going to live with leg pain; I’m going to live with chest pain.’ The heart’s an important part of your body, so it’s important to get that working well and to have patients feel a lot more comfortable with their heart care.”
OSF and Bellin hope to grow and expand the services available at the cardiac catheterization lab in the coming years. For a full list of services currently offered, click here.
