South Shore Hospital Recognized for Responsible Use of Heart Stents

South Shore Hospital has been recognized for its responsible use of coronary stent and angioplasty procedures in a report by The Lown Institute, an independent think tank based in Brookline, Mass. It is listed as having one of the lowest rates of overuse of coronary stent or balloon angioplasty procedures among hospitals across the country, according to Lown’s research.

“The data in this report is a credit to South Shore Hospital and our interventional cardiologists, and we are very pleased to see these results,” said Anthony D. Marks, MD, Chief of Cardiology at South Shore Hospital.

While coronary stents can be lifesaving for someone having a heart attack, years of research shows that stents for stable heart disease provide no benefit over optimal medication therapy. Every seven minutes, however, a Medicare patient receives an unnecessary coronary stent at a U.S. hospital, the new report finds.

The Lown Institute examined overuse of percutaneous coronary interventions at 1,733 general hospital inpatient and outpatient facilities across the United States, and found more than 229,000 procedures met criteria for overuse. Across all hospitals, Lown estimates that more than one-in-five stents were placed unnecessarily in Medicare patients from 2019 to 2021, putting hundreds of thousands of patients in harm’s way at a cost of $2.44 billion.

“The report says that we are selecting patients appropriately, using the right criteria and national guidelines when determining who needs a stent,” said Marks. “That should be very comforting to our community.”

The Cardiovascular Center at South Shore Health specializes in the prevention, detection, treatment and rehabilitation of heart disease using the latest technologies to treat a variety of heart and vascular conditions.

Click here for more information on The Lown Institute and detailed information on this study