LEWISTON – Six months after getting the state’s go-ahead to resume offering invasive heart procedures, St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center is again suspending that service.
This time the hospital is stopping emergency angioplasties because the only local doctor who performed the procedure is leaving.
In May last year, St. Mary’s voluntarily halted the program after state officials raised concerns about whether state approval might be required. In November, the hospital was cleared to resume its program without a state certificate of need.
Starting today, emergency room patients who would have been candidates for an emergency angioplasty at St. Mary’s will be urged to go instead to nearby Central Maine Medical Center or Maine Medical Center in Portland. Both hospitals have extensive heart programs offering that service around the clock.
Angioplasty involves inserting and inflating a tiny balloon into a narrowed or clogged artery in an effort to boost blood flow to the heart.
St. Mary’s can suspend its program without state approval, said Mike Norton, spokesman for the Department of Human Services. If and when the hospital decides to start up the program again, it would need to send a letter of intent to the state, he said. Officials would review plans to determine whether any proposed changes might trigger a certificate of need requirement.
Not all heart patients who arrive at the emergency room need emergency angioplasty, said Russ Donahue, the hospital’s director of marketing. Seven patients had the procedure done in the past three months, he said.
Dr. Alan Langburd, who lived in Poland, performed most of St. Mary’s angioplasties. He worked for Androscoggin Cardiology Associates in Auburn. That group of cardiologists is affiliated with Cardiovascular Consultants of Maine, based in Scarborough.
Langburd left in early June to work in Montana, where he hopes to work in a practice that performs a greater number of angioplasties, said Dr. Dervilla McCann, a partner at the Auburn group.
Other cardiac doctors from the Scarborough group covered for Langburd. Because those doctors live in the Greater Portland area, they could not take over Langburd’s duties on a regular basis, Donahue said.
“That’s not an optimal situation,” he said.
The hospital intends to offer the procedure again and is actively recruiting Langburd’s replacement, Donahue said. Whether St. Mary’s would hire its own doctor or again contract those services through a group like Androscoggin Cardiology Associates is not known, he said.
McCann said she and her colleagues have “thought very long and hard” about whether to hire someone who can pick up where Langburd left off.
“One of our sole purposes of his hire was to develop that program” at St. Mary’s, she said. Having an additional hospital in the Twin Cities offer emergency angioplasty services was a benefit to her heart patients, she said.
“This is a business where we’re all trying to shave minutes,” she said. Two of her patients would likely have had worse outcomes or died had they not gotten the procedure at St. Mary’s, she said.
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