Peter M Scholz, MD Chief

The Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital has markedly improved over the past three to four years. We are currently the largest program for beating heart surgery in the country. We perform beating heart surgery on over 90 percent of our patients with a mortality rate of less than one percent. Most recently, we received the award from Lucent Technology that determined that we were in the top 100 cardiovascular programs in the country.

Just to put this in perspective, if the cardiovascular services in all acute care hospitals performed at the same level as the hospitals in the nations top 100 cardiovascular segment, there would be 4,200 additional patients that would survive each year and an additional 1,600 patients that would be complication free. The winning hospitals are 35 percent less likely than non-winners to have post-operative infections and 20 percent less likely than non-winners to have post-operative hemorrhage for patients undergoing Coronary Artery Bypass Graft (CABG). In addition, the average cost per case was 13 percent lower than the non-winners.

There were 30 winners in the three categories that won. The categories were Community Hospitals, Teaching Hospitals without cardiovascular residency programs and teaching hospitals with cardiovascular residency programs, us being in the latter category. Overall, the scored areas were risk adjusted mortality, risk adjusted surgical mortality, complications, percentage of CABG’s with internal mammary artery use, procedure volume and severity adjusted average length of stay, and wage and severity adjusted average cost.

The second award that we recently won was from Healthgrades Comparative Report Card. This compared Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital with all New Jersey Hospitals and we came in first. There were 20 categories that they monitored and on a scale of one star to five stars and five being the best, we scored five stars in every category which was a total of 100. The second closet hospital was Hackensack which scored five stars in six categories.

In addition to starting our off pump beating heart surgery, most recently we also started minimally invasive mitral valve heart port surgery. Instead of using the standard approach, this approach uses a small 3” incision on the lateral chest which makes the operation easier to perform and there is a quicker recovery. We also have a large experience with aortic aneurysm surgery and in the future plan on using stent placement for thoracic aortic aneurysms.

We are now a Medicare approved Cardiac Transplant Program and in the near future would hope to be involved with research for the total artificial heart.

Pediatric Cardiac Surgery will be beginning in the next six months in collaboration with Columbia Hospital.

We have now performed over 100 operations for atrial fibrillation and most of these are on a beating heart. Thus, cardiac surgery at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital has grown to be a national leader in many categories and we will continue to be at the forefront of clinical and academic research in the future.