Advocate Christ Medical Center is a leader in heart care services. We perform more heart surgeries than any other hospital in Northern Illinois. This experience is why more patients chose Christ Medical Center to have their heart surgery any other hospital in the Northern state. Numbers translate into experience — and that’s exactly why you’d want to choose the cardiovascular experts at Christ Medical Center when you or a loved one has a heart problem. As a premier provider, our cardiac services team offers the complete continuum of heart care, from diagnosis and treatment to heart transplant surgery and rehabilitation.

At the forefront of research, a team of Christ Medical Center cardiovascular surgeons performed Illinois’ first roboticly assisted mitral-valve-repair surgery. The medical center was one of only 12 medical institutions in the nation to take part in this Food and Drug Administration-approved trial. Click here to take a virtual tour of one of the surgeries.

Our premiere expertise doesn’t stop here. Christ Medical Center is home to the Heart Failure Institute. As one of the most comprehensive CHF programs in the country, our program combines education, support, medication management and investigational therapies — all with the goal of helping CHF patients achieve and maintain an optimal level of health. The CHF Institute’s "firsts" include medical center physicians:

• successfully placing a mesh-like girdle, or "jacket," around a woman’s heart last summer to treat her severe congestive heart failure.
• developing the state’s first CHF screening program using a simple blood test called the BNP test (B-type natiuretic peptide).
• being the first in the United States to implant a ventricular assist device to support a patient’s failing heart.

Christ Medical Center is also home to southern Cook County’s busiest emergency department. Nearly 78,000 patients sought treatment at this Level I trauma center — the highest designation possible. Housed within this center is the emergency cardiac center, a specially designated area of the emergency room where physicians and nurses streamline care and testing, expedite diagnosis and oversee heart attack treatment.

If your primary care physician believes you may have a heart condition, Christ Medical Center’s series of cardiodiagnostic testing will help you know for sure. Should one of these tests detect a rhythm, electrical or valve problem with your heart, an electrophysiology procedure may be in order. If a blockage is found in an artery, patients are taken to the cardiac catheterization laboratory where they undergo any of a number of state-of-the-art procedures.

Following a procedure, your doctors may decide you need to be enrolled in the Christ Medical Center cardiac rehabilitation program. Our program offers support and is designed to complete the patient’s recovery process and assist in improving the quality of life — all under the watchful eye of specially trained cardiac nurses and masters-prepared exercise physiologists. The medical center’s pulmonary rehabilitation is coordinated by the same staff who help patients with heart and lung problems learn ways to exercise and monitor diet and medication to lead a more functional life.

Christ Medical Center is proud to share its heart care expertise with the people of Chicagoland. When you need heart care, there’s no need to go anywhere but to the leader.

* Source: Illinois Hospital Association CompData 2002