Dec. 24 -- Thirty years ago, Freeman Health System cardiologists performed the hospital's first-ever cardiac catheterization.
Now a heart program that started in a mobile unit performing about 100 catheterizations a year has grown into the Freeman Heart & Vascular Institute.
Cardiologist John Cox, the surgeon who performed that first cardiac catheterization, talked about it last week in one of those cath labs.
"During that time we've grown tremendously," Cox said. "We went from a mobile lab to now four very busy cath labs. We had a goal our first year to do 100 heart procedures in our lab. We hit that number, and this last year we did 4,300, so we've had tremendous growth during that time. The program has been an innovator in this region of all kinds of new procedures. We've been the first to do lots of things."
According to Freeman, a cardiac catheterization is a procedure done to test for specific heart or blood vessel problems such as clogged arteries or irregular heartbeats. The procedure uses a hollow tube called a catheter that's guided through a blood vessel to the heart. The test gives cardiologists key details about the heart muscle, heart valves and vessels in the heart.
"There was a need for additional heart expertise in Joplin so we conceived of building initially a mobile lab just to get us off the ground," Cox said. "That lab allowed us to do some diagnostic procedures and then some months later we were able to do our first cardiac procedures here. It began with that procedure."
Cox said the first procedures performed 30 years ago were diagnostic in nature, meaning they used the images and other information to diagnose what was wrong and decided what to do about it in a future procedure.
Cox said the technology involved in doing cardiac catheterization has changed dramatically in 30 years, allowing doctors to do the diagnostic procedure and decide right there what needs to be done, then take whatever interventions are determined to be needed at the same time, saving the patient a return trip to the hospital.
"The old technology was to create images on 35 millimeter film," Cox said. "You could replay that on a giant tape recorder that you had to rewind to look at older images. It was difficult when you did a procedure to see exactly the details. Often times, you had to do the case, take the pictures and develop the film and then look and decide, 'What am I going to do?' Nowadays you have instant replay of very detailed images so on the fly we can see exactly what's going on and make decisions on the table contemporaneous with the procedure going on. There's not a need to do a diagnostic procedure and pause and develop film and contemplate what's going on. We can move from a diagnostic procedure to a therapeutic procedure very quickly."
Cox said the procedures performed at the Freeman Heart & Vascular Institute have likely allowed thousands of people to live longer and more fulfilling lives.
Cox also introduced Elizabeth Baum, a cardiovascular technician at Freeman, who was with him 30 years ago for that first catheterization procedure.
"We started with four people, now we're up to about 18-20 people," Baum said. "We do multiple different procedures now when back then it was one procedure, diagnostic. Now we do interventions and work on a lot of different parts of the body, not just the heart."