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Excela Health Is Here for Your Heart

The Center for Cardiovascular Medicine

Excela Health is committed to helping you keep your heart healthy. Our Center for Cardiovascular Medicine encompasses a full range of cardiac services, from early detection and diagnosis to treatment, open heart surgery and cardiac rehabilitation. Many diagnostic and post– cardiac surgery services can be found on all three Excela Health campuses: Frick Hospital, Latrobe Hospital and Westmoreland Hospital.

For interventional cardiac services, construction will be completed this January on the new Center for Cardiovascular Medicine at Westmoreland Hospital.

Diagnostic cardiology services are available at all hospital campuses. These include electrocardiogram, echocardiogram, transesophageal echocardiograms, stress echocardiography, nuclear stress testing, Dobutamine echo, MUGA scans, tilt table test and event and holter monitoring.

Our cardiac catheterization laboratories are staffed with highly skilled interventional cardiologists. They perform precise procedures such as intracoronary stenting, atherectomy, diagnostic cardiac catheterization, acute angioplasty and stent for myocardial infarction, balloon angioplasty, drug eluting stent deployment, thrombectomy and intravascular ultrasound. In cooperation with interventional radiologists and vascular surgeons, Westmoreland and Latrobe hospitals perform a wide variety of peripheral vascular interventions. One lab is dedicated to electrophysiology studies including pacemaker implantation, automatic defibrillator implantation and ablation.

Open heart surgery, offered at Westmoreland Hospital, is performed by cardiothoracic surgeons who live and work in our own communities and are skilled in all aspects of cardiac, thoracic and vascular surgery.

They perform pacemaker and automatic defibrillator implantation and, where appropriate, minimally invasive surgical techniques to reduce patient discomfort and shorten hospital stays. Other procedures include coronary artery bypass grafting, cardiac valve replacement/repair, minimally invasive heart and lung surgery including the “keyhole” method, treatment for benign and malignant diseases of the lung and chest wall and vascular procedures such as carotid endarterectomy for heart patients. Our surgeons also take a multidisciplinary approach in treating lung cancers and perform procedures such as extracorporeal membrane oxygenation for the support of a failing heart.

Vascular surgery includes surgical interventions of the veins and arteries as well as minimally invasive procedures and therapies for diseases of the peripheral vascular system. Treatments may include open vascular surgery including carotid endartectomy and aorta and extremity aneurysm bypass; endovascular surgery (angioplasty, stenting, abdominal aortic aneurysm); all A-V access surgery and varicose vein surgery (closure, stab phlebectomy, ligation and stripping).