Sarasota Memorial Hospital expands partnership with Columbia University

The electrophysiology program at Sarasota Memorial is good now, said Dr. Michael Argenziano, chief of adult cardiac surgery at New York Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, but these improvements from the Columbia partnership will likely attract more patients.

“When we say (to Sarasota Memorial) you have a great program now, you’re providing the standard electrophysiological treatments at high quality and low risk, which is more than a lot of places,” Argenziano said. “But there’s a whole other category of procedures that you’re not providing, and adding those could do as much as double the volume of patients.”

The announcement of an expanded partnership comes as the results from the previous three years show increased patient volumes and better outcomes for Sarasota Memorial’s cardiac surgery program after partnering with Columbia.

The number of patients undergoing cardiac surgery at the hospital has increased by 30 percent in the last three years, and cardiology by 15 percent. Patients are also having better outcomes following cardiac surgery, the data show. The Columbia partnership has also helped the hospital recruit several new cardiac surgeons to Sarasota, including cardiovascular surgery chief Dr. Jeffery Sell, who come to Sarasota in 2013.

Cardiac conditions tend to become more severe with age, and Sarasota’s large population of older patients makes treatment an area of intense competition among health care providers.

For smaller hospitals, affiliating with a nationally recognized health center can help attract patients in a crowded health care market, Smith said.

In a study of consumers, researchers in Kentucky found that these affiliations, “positively affect consumer future behavior and benefit the organizations involved,” according to a study published in the journal Health Marketing Quarterly.

Columbia University started its Heart Source program in 1997, and many other health systems have followed, including the Johns Hopkins Health System based in Baltimore, the Cleveland Clinic and the Mayo Clinic, among others.

In addition to the Columbia partnership, Sarasota Memorial has invested more than $2 million in its electrophysiology program in recent years and plans to invest $8 million more over the next three years to enhance its program by purchasing equipment and attracting more specialists to the area.

“We want to strive to be world class, and in the same way we took our cardiovascular surgery program and made it better, that’s what we’re going to do with electrophysiology … to demonstrate value back to our community,” said Sarasota Memorial CEO David Verinder.