Via Christi’s Valve Clinic has moved to a larger location within Via Christi Hospital St. Francis.
It is now located on the second floor in space that formerly housed the Via Christi Cancer Outreach and Risk Assessment program, which moved to the freestanding Via Christi Cancer Center last month.
The Valve Clinic’s new space, adjacent to an elevator only steps away from the hospital’s west entrance, has twice the number of rooms it previously had for evaluating patients for advanced therapies including:
- Trans-catheter aortic valve replacement, or TAVR
- MitraClip forrepairing mitral valve regurgitation; and Watchman for left atrial appendage closure. It also provides Via Christi’s growing structural heart program with a larger reception area for patients and additional office and storage space
- Percutaneous cardiac defects closure for stroke patients
- Watchman for left atrial appendage closure for atrial fibrillation patients seeking an alternative to long-term anticoagulation therapy
It also provides Via Christi’s growing structural heart program with a larger reception area for patients and additional office and storage space
“We’ve become a comprehensive program — one that offers a vast spectrum of therapies in order to match patients’ needs — and we simply needed more room to accommodate our growth,” said Bassem Chehab, MD, the structural heart specialist who serves as the program’s medical director. Other members of the team include surgeons Brett Grizzell, MD, and Sanjay Khicha, MD, both of Wichita Surgical Specialists; cardiologist Richard Steckley, MD, Cardiovascular Consultants of Kansas; and physician assistant Richard Allenbach, who serves as the Via Christi Valve Clinic’s director.
In less than four years, the team has performed nearly 500 TAVR and more than 100 MitraClip procedures in St. Francis’ specially equipped hybrid OR — with outcomes that place the program among the top centers in the nation.
It’s this combination of experience and quality outcomes that has led to the program being invited to participate alongside the nation’s leading academic centers in TAVR, mitral clip and other structural heart pivotal clinical trials.
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About Via Christi Health
In Kansas, Ascension’s Via Christi Health operates nine hospitals and 75 other sites of care and employs more than 6,000 associates. Across the state, Via Christi provided more than $77.8 million in community benefit and care of persons living in poverty in fiscal year 2016. Serving Kansas for more than 135 years, Ascension is a faith-based healthcare organization committed to delivering compassionate, personalized care to all, with special attention to persons living in poverty and those most vulnerable. Ascension is the largest non-profit health system in the U.S. and the world’s largest Catholic health system, operating 2,500 sites of care – including 141 hospitals and more than 30 senior living facilities – in 24 states and the District of Columbia. Visit www.viachristi.org
