Region's largest heart, vascular hospital opens

Good Samaritan opens its heart and vascular hospital after buying Dayton Heart Hospital.

DAYTON — Good Samaritan Hospital ushered in a new era for heart care in the region on Tuesday, Sept. 1, with the opening of its $31 million heart and vascular hospital.

With 117 private rooms, all of which were full on Tuesday, Dayton Heart & Vascular Hospital at Good Samaritan is the Dayton region’s largest heart hospital in terms of beds.

Kettering Medical Center’s Schuster Heart Hospital, slated for completion in late spring, will have 90 beds. And 108 of 180 private rooms in Miami Valley Hospital’s partially completed 11-story tower will be designated for heart care. That project also is slated to be done in 2010.

The region’s hospitals aren’t overdoing it, claims Mark Shaker, Good Samaritan Hospital’s president and CEO. Much of the added space reflects a trend toward giving patients their own rooms, he said. Good Sam, for example, netted an increase of just 14 beds in the renovation, he said.

That doesn’t include the loss of 47 beds with the closing last month of Dayton Heart Hospital, a competing heart hospital that Good Samaritan bought in 2008 for $55 million. With Tuesday’s opening, that heart hospital has been fully absorbed by Good Sam.

The transition from the old heart hospital on Edwin C. Moses Boulevard to the new heart and vascular hospital went “ridiculously smoothly,” said Dr. George Broderick, medical director of cardiology services.

He told a crowd, estimated at 200 to 300, that the hospital last month opened blocked arteries with an angioplasty balloon within 90 minutes of all cardiac patients’ arrival at the hospital. Typically, that goal is met in 80 percent to 90 percent of cases, he said. Such “door-to-balloon” times are a key metric in heart care.

The former Dayton Heart Hospital’s patient-centered approach will be key for the new “hospital within a hospital,” Shaker said. That approach involves cross-training staff so fewer hospital workers come in contact with any one patient. The result: patients more apt to know those who care for them.

Each room at the Dayton Heart & Vascular Hospital has its own bathroom, cable television and wireless Internet access, as well as shower facilities shared with another room.

HealthGrades, an independent health care ratings company, has ranked Good Sam’s heart and vascular program as best in the region for cardiac surgery.

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