MGHS Cardiac Care Award

The Mayo Clinic, the Cleveland Clinic and now Marquette General Health System.

MGHS has joined those much better-known facilities among the country’s top 50 hospitals for cardiovascular care.

This is the fifth straight year that national health care data company Thomson Reuters has named Marquette General among the country’s top 100 hospitals for heart health.

But this time, the company narrowed it to the top 50, and MGHS still made the cut.

Part of that involves registered nurses working with doctors to get patients having heart attacks into specialized care faster no matter where in the U.P. they are.

Anita Henry is an RN in cardiac imaging, and she says the protocols she developed with the doctors may involve patients from other parts of the U.P. bypassing their nearest emergency rooms to go directly to MGHS.

But she says that’s to make sure the patients can have specialized care that may not be available in their own local areas in time to keep them alive.

Dr. Thomas LeGalley has been providing cardiac care at Marquette General since shortly before the hospital performed its first open-heart surgery in 1978.

He says originally, the state wanted to shut MGHS’s cardiac care program down because state officials were concerned there wasn’t enough demand in the U.P.

Dr. LeGalley says it was unfortunate that it worked out this way, but they proved the state wrong, since the U.P. has an older population at higher risk of heart disease and heart attacks than younger people.