Northwell Health is opening a new cardiac catheterization lab in the West Village, part of a growing industry strategy to decentralize hospital services and reduce overhead.
The health giant is opening a new cath lab for cardiac emergencies and elective procedures at Lenox Health Greenwich Village, a satellite emergency department and ambulatory surgery center affiliated with Upper East Side-based Lenox Hill Hospital. Part of a $37 million project, the program will allow the free-standing outpost to accept heart attack patients via ambulance for the first time, giving the site an influx of visitors who are currently being sent to other hospitals. It will also create an 11,000-square-foot inpatient unit to allow patients from the cath lab and surgical units to be admitted for short stays, with the most severe cases still being transferred out.
The new cath lab and inpatient unit will harden the site’s footprint in the neighborhood, filling a niche left by St. Vincent’s Medical Center, which occupied the same building and closed in 2010. It is expected to perform 1,000 procedures in the first year, according to Avinash Ramsadeen, a spokesman for the hospital. As part of the current construction, Lenox Health will add an electrophysiology lab for treatment related to the heart’s electrical activity, expand its blood and microbiology lab space and pharmacy and install a kitchen to allow food services for the first time.
Health systems across New York have been expanding their suite of cardiac cath labs in recent years with rising cases of heart disease and a growing demand for treatment. The labs offer treatments ranging from the routine opening of blood vessels to more invasive surgical techniques, making them lucrative for the large health systems that have consolidated in recent years while expanding their outpatient footprint.
What is now Lenox Health Greenwich Village opened in 2014 following a model in use in West Coast health systems to decouple emergency departments from hospitals, which are expensive to build and do not admit a majority of patients who visit, said Tracy Feiertag, the facility’s vice president. In the years since it has added to its services, performing a growing number of procedures at its emergency department, ambulatory center and physicians practices while avoiding the cost of admitting patients.
Its emergency department is currently only equipped to take stroke patients, sending 350 cardiac patients to Lenox Hill Hospital alone in 2024, according to the health system, which brought in $13.6 billion in the first three quarters of last year. That does not include the patients Feiertag said are sent to closer hospitals, the most acute going to Bellevue Hospital Center and Mount Sinai Beth Israel before it began the process of closing down. Those patients will be able to be treated onsite once the lab opens, which is expected in June, Feiertag said.
