Accomplishments made in cardiac surgery, joint replacement in Southwest Georgia

ALBANY — Strides are being made in Southwest Georgia in joint replacement and cardiac surgery.

Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital recently received Center of Excellence designation for its total hip and knee joint replacement program. Phoebe was awarded hip and knee replacement certification (HKRC) by DNV GL Healthcare Inc., after a yearlong process that included observations, interviews and document reviews.

Phoebe offers a program including a dedicated orthopaedic nurse navigator, who ensures patients and their families are prepared before surgery and throughout recovery. The nurse navigator oversees the total joint camp, which provides patients with education, assistance and support needed to get back to their lives.

Before surgery, patients attend total joint camp to understand what to expect and to review their plan of care and pain management options, Phoebe officials said.

“We do 400 joints a year,” said Maureen Jackson, vice president of surgical services at Phoebe. “We have a good volume, and we know what we are doing.”

Since early 2014, officials said Phoebe has maintained a zero infection rate in knee replacement surgeries and is working to have the same long-term rate for other procedures.

Officials said the process for HKRC includes evaluation of standards of care relating directly to the patients both before and after surgery, infection prevention and control, and leadership management spanning from senior management to medical staff. The certification also integrates requirements related to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Conditions of Participation for hospitals.

Surgical site infection rates for various surgical procedures, including total hip and knee replacements, are now available at phoebehealth.com/quality and will be updated quarterly.

During a meeting of the hospital’s Board of Directors on Wednesday, Dr. Mark Cohen, interventional cardiologist with the Phoebe Heart Valve Clinic, provided an update on transcatheter aortic valve replacement, or TAVR, a heart procedure first performed at Phoebe in October 2015 that has given surgical opportunities for those who would not otherwise be viable candidates for valve replacement surgery.

The surgery involves entering with a catheter into the femoral artery, rather than opening the patient’s chest, to put in a new heart valve.

Cohen said that a trial was recently completed on moderate risk patients, and so far there has been no trial in which TAVR has done worse than traditional valve replacement surgery. The open chest surgery has an average procedure time of 310 minutes, a good bit longer than the average time of 195 minutes for TAVR.

To date, nine TAVR procedures have been done at Phoebe. No bleeds or vascular injury have been associated with those procedures, which requires an average hospital stay of three days, Cohen said.

The board heard Wednesday from Fran Rice, 88, one of the patients who has had the procedure done.

Cohen also discussed the Impella technology, used for hemodynamic support of high-risk intervention patients.