With more than 75,000 unique cardiac patients per year, Cardiovascular Services is one of the busiest departments at Baylor Scott & White Medical Center – Hillcrest in Waco. Changing demographics have further increased the need for high-quality heart and vascular care as more families move to the area and a large portion of the population enters retirement age. In fact, over the last three years, patient volumes have grown by over 20 percent.
With your help, we can continue to care for hearts in the five-county “Heart of Texas” region served by our Hillcrest campus—with upgraded technology and facilities, education and wellness initiatives in our community and continuing education and training for our care providers.
Giving opportunity: Cardiac MRI software
To lower a patient’s risk of heart attack—or to treat a heart attack in an emergency—doctors may recommend Coronary Artery Bypass Grafting (CABG) to help improve blood flow to the heart when coronary arteries are narrowed or blocked. Also known as heart bypass surgery, the procedure uses healthy blood vessels from another part of the body to create a new route for blood to flow that bypasses the narrowed or blocked arteries.
As with all surgeries, CABG comes with risks, and patients and care teams must decide whether the benefits outweigh the risks. Before recommending CABG, physicians use pre-operative imaging to determine the viability of cardiac tissue or whether restoring blood flow will enable the tissue to function properly again. If enough tissue is not viable due to permanent damage, the surgery may not be worth the risk.
While other imaging methods can provide limited information on cardiac tissue viability, the best option is a cardiac MRI scan. However, patients of our Waco hospital must currently travel to Temple for this specialized scan and may have to wait up to six weeks for an appointment.
With upgrades and additional software for our current MRI system, cardiac MRI scans will be available on our Waco campus, increasing availability and reducing wait times for patients in both Waco and Temple.
“This would be a game changer for access to cardiac care in Waco,” said Terri Doss, MBA, BSN, RN-BC, NEA-BC, director for cardiovascular services at Baylor Scott & White Medical Center – Hillcrest. “This can take our cardiovascular program to the next level and will improve patient satisfaction since patients will not have to seek care in other communities.”
