SOUTHFIELD — The high-tech heart of Detroit is beating strong. And your membership in The Engineering Society of Detroit now gives you a chance to take an exclusive, behind-the-scenes tour of high-tech medicine at the new, $78 million DMC Heart Hospital.
The tour begins at 2 p.m. Wednesday, March 4 at the hospital, 311 Mack Ave., at the corner of Brush Street. Ample parking is available at an adjacent parking ramp.
The cost of the tour is $25 for ESD members. Nonmembers can join ESD for $75 (a 25 percent discount) and take the tour for free. (This offer is good for new, first-time members only.)
To sign up for the tour, visit this link or call (248) 353-0735, ext. 222.
The DMC Heart Hospital offers 215,000 square feet of surgical and clinical space, a cafeteria, two floors of in-house physician offices and more.
DMC cardiologists, cardiac surgeons and vascular surgeons now work together, in a single place, with a single goal: To provide extraordinary, immediate heart care to patients suffering from all forms of heart and vascular disease.
DMC’s leadership in cardiac care goes back more than 60 years. In 1952, doctors at Harper Hospital performed the first successful heart bypass operation of the left ventricle, with the help of a mechanical heart pump created with engineers from General Motors.
The hospital features six new catheterization laboratories, four new operating rooms, clinics for heart failure treatment, heart valve replacement and atrial fibrillation, and areas for echocardiography, stress testing and cardiac imaging.
The technology behind all of those areas will be part of the tour — as will the high-tech construction techniques used in the building itself.
Today’s DMC Heart Hospital…
* Is home to Cardio Team One, where America’s best interventional cardiologists are on site 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Cardio Team One has cut the life-saving treatment time for Emergency Room patients with suspected heart attacks door to balloon (intervention to open blocked arteries) treatment time approximately in half. DMC door to balloon times consistently average 45 minutes, unlike the 90 minute national average.
* Offers support and collaboration with the DMC Emergency Departments, including the only Senior ER in the U.S. which will be staffed by board-certified emergency physicians and board-certified geriatricians on the front lines treating patients in collaborating in evaluating and treating the older adult.
* Has a ground-breaking medical technology designed to protect patients with diabetes-related arterial disease (plaque preventing blood flow to limbs) from the risk of foot or leg amputation. The innovative new procedure — one of the first of its kind to be used in the country and the first in Southeastern Michigan — is aimed at greatly reducing the need for lower-limb amputations by restoring interrupted blood-flow to disease-damaged arteries.
* Conducted the nation’s first artery-repair procedure using a new high-tech, catheter-delivered tool designed to pump up to four liters of blood per minute through a patient’s circulatory system. The new device allows the heart to rest while repairs are made to damaged arteries. The breakthrough “Impella CP” procedure is the first ever conducted in North America and to date, DMC has done more impella procedures than anywhere else in the world.