Norton Healthcare is putting all of its cardiovascular care under one roof

Norton Healthcare is consolidating all of its heart and vascular care to one location on its Audubon campus. The Norton Heart and Vascular Institute will specialize in advanced heart failure and recovery, general cardiology, cardiac surgery, electrophysiology, interventional cardiology, structural heart, and vascular surgery. The 31,000-square-foot institute houses 40 exam rooms, multiple outpatient procedure rooms, and monitoring capabilities for patients with heart rhythm devices. The center also offers collaborative spaces for specialists and patients to work together.”If there’s been anything that’s been clear over the past five, ten years is our need to humanize that to some degree to allow people to have an understanding of expectations and to have those human interactions,” said Dr. Joseph Lash, the executive medical director at the Norton Heart and Vascular Institute. “Now, having the opportunity to hey, wait a minute, I need to talk to one of my colleagues. Let me walk down the hall just a minute and drag him in here, and we’ll have a quick conversation … It facilitates all of those human interactions that go into health care.”The space will also offer a service that is completely new to Norton Healthcare — a dedicated chest pain clinic. “So that is a way for primary care and immediate care providers to refer people who have non-acute chest pain or non-emergent chest pain to our center to have evaluation by some of our cardiology team to determine what level of care they need next,” said Tara Mudd, a nurse practitioner and the director of operations at the institute. Mudd said that this service will allow patients to avoid the hospital when it’s not an emergency. The Norton Heart and Vascular Institute will officially open to patients on Tuesday, Oct. 17. For more information, click here.