Silver Cross Hospital opens new heart care center

Silver Cross Hospital in New Lenox virtually celebrated the opening of its new, $22 million cardiac expansion program on Wednesday afternoon.

Watch the program and take a virtual tour of the new facility at silvercross.org/virtualheart.

Features include two cardiovascular operating rooms, two recovery rooms, four cardiac echo and stress testing rooms, and 16-bed cardiovascular unit where heart patients will stay before and after procedures.

The facility also includes a cardiac hybrid room for the minimally invasive transcatheter aortic valve replacement prcedure, also known as TAVR. During the TAVR procedure, a thin catheter is moved through an artery in the leg and up into the heart, where a new heart valve is implanted.

Interventional cardiologist and Structural Heart Medical Director Dr. Ravi Ramana discussed TAVR during the virtual celebration and in another video.

Ramana said that valve replacement was typically done by open heart surgery, with the 20-year-old TAVR procedure typically reserved for elderly patients. But over the last decade, younger patients have also undergone the TAVR procedures, he said. TAVR has since become part of the standard of care for severe heart valve disease, he said.

In 2019, TAVR procedures surpassed open heart surgery for the first time, according to Silver Cross’ virtual celebration video.

Ramana said he has performed more than 500 TAVR procedures over the past nine years at other Chicago locations. He said the team at Silver Cross has performed more than 1,000 TAVR procedures.

In the celebration video, CEO Ruth Colby said Silver Cross’ cardiac catheterization lab was ranked as the eighth largest in Illinois in 2018.

“But we were missing some key components,” Colby said in the video, “namely, open heart surgery and a structural heart care program.”

In 2019, with the permission of Illinois and through a partnership with Cardiothoracic & Vascular Surgical Associates, led by Dr. Pat Pappas, Silver Cross started an open heart program, Colby said. The hospital has since performed more than 300 open-heart procedures “and the outcomes have been outstanding,” Colby said.

The virtual celebration opened with Pete Grossi of Lockport sharing his experiences with Silver Cross. Grossi had the first open heart procedure at the New Lenox hospital.

On its website, Silver Cross said a 2017 Will County Community Needs Assessment determined heart disease was the number one cause of death and the second leading cause of hospitalization.

The Centers for Disease Control said 47% of the people in the U.S. already have at least one of three risk factors for heart disease. These risk factors are high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and smoking. Other risk factors for heart disease include diabetes, unhealthy cholesterol levels and obesity.