Former President Bill Clinton’s chest pain episode and subsequent stent placement has helped increase awareness about the importance of quick coronary intervention.

What's a stent, you ask?

The mesh metal tubes work as a scaffolding to keep clogged arteries propped open. The procedure is so common, about 1 million are done each year in cardiac catheterization labs across the United States. Approximately 6500 patients a year visit the St. John’s Hospital cardiac cath lab, making it one of the busiest in the state.

St. John’s Cardiac Catheterization Lab is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week with 8 procedure rooms containing state-of-the-art digital imaging equipment that visualizes and detects coronary/vascular disease. The cardiac cath lab team includes highly skilled and specialized cardiologists, nurses, radiological technologists and others who perform diagnostic and intervention procedures.

Currently, St. Johns’ angiographic success rate involving stents is 99.8% which ranks in the 90^th percentile of facilities that participate in the American College of Cardiology National Cardiovascular Data Registry.

Another quality marker – readmission rates - reported by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid at hospitalcompare.gov,  show St. John’s is a top performing hospital with statistically significantly lower 30-day readmission rate.