Delnor wants to fix your heart
Delnor-Community Hospital in Geneva has recently remodeled emergency and maternity departments, a health-and-fitness center and a cancer-treatment building. It's adding more beds to accommodate population growth in central Kane County.
But if you need a heart bypass operation, you have to go elsewhere.
The fact that patients at most other hospitals nearby can get those operations is being cited in its application for permission to add open-heart surgery services.
"Consumers are smart. They know you don't always have to go to academic centers for great care," said Phil Duffin, Delnor's director of cardiovascular program development.
"People want to do more things with their own physician taking care of them at their hospitals," he said.
Delnor filed the application at the end of December, and it is tentatively scheduled to be considered by the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board in July.
The hospital needs the state's permission because the state wants to avoid unnecessary duplication of facilities and services in order to hold down medical costs.
If all goes as Delnor wants, cardiac surgeons could be operating there by April 2009.
Delnor notes that all hospitals within a 30-minute drive of it provide open-heart surgery.
Within 90 minutes, only three other hospitals don't offer it: St. Alexius in Hoffman Estates, Adventist GlenOaks in Glendale Heights, and Kishwaukee Community in DeKalb.
Delnor offers cardiac catheterization, including percutaneous coronary intervention, formerly known as angioplasty. In PCI, a balloon is inserted into an artery and inflated, flattening plaque and improving blood flow to the heart muscle. It also does diagnostic tests, where dye is injected to discover blockages.
Delnor opened the lab in 2002. It does the procedures only on emergency cases. Before the hospital had the lab, 10 percent of its heart-attack patients died; that number is down to 1 percent.
One of the medical practices that supplies the PCI physicians says that to maintain quality, the lab needs to do more PCIs, and that means doing elective cases. But the practice wants to follow the 2005 recommendation of the American College of Cardiology that when doing non-emergency or elective cases, you have an open-heart operating room available as a back-up.
"To be good at emergencies, we should have a well-trained team. We treat 30 to 40 acute attacks (a year). We need to do more than that," Duffin said.
Presently, if the physicians sense an emergency PCI may be a problem, and the patient is medically stable, the patient is usually transferred to another hospital.
Delnor estimates that from Oct. 1, 2006, to Sept. 30, 2007, 119 people who could have had open-heart procedures or elective PCIs done at Delnor went elsewhere, mostly to Sherman Hospital in Elgin.
So far, only St. Anthony Medical Center in Rockford has objected to the plan. It fears that losing its Kane and DeKalb county patients to Delnor would cut its heart-surgery patient load below a level considered acceptable by the state for good practice. Cardiology experts believe that the more procedures a practitioner and a hospital do, the more likely their patients are to survive and thrive.
Delnor says it does not expect to pick up the DeKalb County patients, leaving St. Anthony with enough open-heart surgery patients.
Delnor also believes that between the population growth of central Kane County and the aging of that population, more people around here will need open-heart surgery.