BOSTON -- The long drives to Boston will be a thing of the past for North Shore patients who need open heart surgery. The state Department of Public Health yesterday approved the North Shore Medical Center's request to offer open heart procedures at Salem Hospital.
The move will make the hospital, one of North Shore Medical Center's several health care institutions, the only place that provides open heart surgery between Portsmouth, N.H., and Boston. Salem Hospital plans to work with Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston to launch an open heart surgery program in May of next year.
DPH selected Salem Hospital and two other organizations -- Southcoast Hospitals of New Bedford and Cape Cod Hospital of Barnstable -- to open new open heart surgery units. For two decades, the only places in eastern Massachusetts that have offered the procedure have been teaching hospitals in Boston. DPH Deputy Commissioner Paul Jacobsen said agency officials picked those three institutions out of six applicants primarily because they were the only three that demonstrated they could achieve an adequate volume of open heart surgeries.
The three that were rejected were Brockton Hospital, South Shore Hospital in Weymouth and MetroWest Medical Center in Framingham.
"I always knew as long as the process was fair and they didn't muddy it up with politics that North Shore Medical Center would do fine," said Sen. Frederick Berry, a Peabody Democrat who helped ensure the passage of legislation last year that allows the community hospitals to perform open heart surgeries. Berry said the DPH approval will help Salem Hospital at a time when hospitals across the state are struggling. He said Salem Hospital could use the boost even though it has been reporting relatively strong income levels compared to other hospitals.
"It's a consistent revenue stream that will balance out a lot of the losses they assume (for) the emergency room and uncompensated care," Berry said. "It will help the hospital remain solvent while it provides a very important medical procedure to my constituents without going all the way into Boston."
North Shore Medical Center officials welcomed the news yesterday. "By collaborating with Massachusetts General Hospital, we are bringing the cardiac surgical expertise of one of the world's leading cardiac surgery programs to a community hospital system that has consistently proven its capability with sophisticated diagnostic and surgical techniques," NSMC president Gary Gottlieb said in a prepared statement.
The $7.1 million needed to build a cardiac surgical service at Salem will be provided from an internal pool of capital maintained by the medical center's parent organization, Partners HealthCare System, hospital officials said.
That cost includes $2.7 million that will be used to build an 8,450-square-foot cardiac surgical suite with eight beds for post-surgical care and two new operating rooms.
Open heart surgeries are currently offered at 11 teaching hospitals in Boston, Worcester and Springfield. The state banned the procedure at community hospitals after a series of deaths at Malden Hospital in the 1970s.
However, supporters say medical advancements at community hospitals have solved those problems.
The DPH is allowed to approve open heart surgery at two more community hospitals by July 1, 2004, and another two by July 1, 2007. The DPH is required to submit a report to the state Legislature on the first three programs before any more are approved.
Sen. Mark Montigny, a New Bedford Democrat who wrote the open heart surgery legislation, said it provides the proper DPH oversight and safeguards. He rejected an earlier version of the open heart surgery bill in 1999, saying it circumvented the DPH and a legislative commission that was studying the issue.
"Let science and medicine dictate it, not politics and money," he said. "I believe the three that were chosen are the strongest and most compelling cases."