The hospital’s new hybrid cardiovascular interventional suite combines a fully equipped, open-heart operating room with a catheterization lab featuring the latest technology.

Now, the hospital has opened a hybrid cardiovascular interventional suite. This revolutionary facility combines a fully equipped, open-heart operating room with a catheterization lab featuring the latest imaging technology. The suite’s unique design allows interventional cardiologists, who perform nonsurgical, catheter-based procedures such as angioplasty and stenting, to work side by side with surgeons in a collaborative effort that was impossible before.

Best of Both Worlds
“The facility represents a revolutionary step in heart care,” says Daniel Bethencourt, M.D., medical director of cardiovascular surgery at Orange Coast Memorial. By working together in the same room, interventional cardiologists and surgeons can provide patients with the best of both worlds.” In many hospitals, cardiac operating rooms and cath labs are located on different floors or in separate areas. If problems arise during angioplasty that require surgical intervention, patients must be transferred from the cath lab to an operating room, delaying or postponing lifesaving treatment. By contrast, the hybrid suite can quickly be converted into a state-of-the-art operating room with a full surgical team. This allows physicians to move without delay from a catheterization procedure to a surgical one.

Way of the Future
In addition, patients who need a certain type of cardiac bypass surgery, as well as angioplasty to open other blocked coronary arteries, can now have both procedures done at once. Other procedures such as heart valve repair will also be performed in the facility. “Before the hybrid suite, patients had to endure two separate procedures on different days in different locations,” says Dr. Bethencourt. “The hybrid approach facilitates a new, more effective way of treating heart patients and will soon become a required resource in major cardiovascular centers. It represents the way of the future.”