Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak has announced it is among one of the first hospitals in the nation to use a new minimally invasive heart pump for patients with severe right-side heart failure.
“Until now, there have been few options for these critically ill patients other than a surgically implanted ventricular assist device,” says Dr. Simon Dixon, chair of cardiovascular medicine at Beaumont Health System. “This revolutionary technology provides a minimally invasive approach to support and bridge these patients until the right heart has had time to recover.”
Dixon says the device provides circulatory assistance for up for two weeks for patients who develop heart failure following a heart attack, open-heart surgery, a heart transplant, or left ventricular assist device implantation. It’s implanted on the right side of the patient’s heart through a small incision in a vein in the leg. The heart pump then draws blood from the major vein that drains to the heart into the main pulmonary artery in the lungs.
Beaumont interventional cardiologist Dr. Ivan Hanson and heart surgeon Dr. Jeffrey Altshuler performed Michigan’s first commercial implant of the device in March, for a 72-year-old man from Detroit.
The device received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval in January. In clinical trails, there was a 73 percent survival rate for the 30 patients enrolled in the trial. ​
