East End hospital to offer expanded cardiac care services

The Stony Brook University Heart Institute said Thursday it will begin to offer select electrophysiology services to treat heart rhythm disorders, also known as arrhythmias, at Stony Brook Southampton Hospital.

The services will launch at the East End facility on July 1.

Patients who need a pacemaker, defibrillator or loop recorder implantation to help regulate their heartbeats will be able to get those services at Stony Brook Southampton Hospital. The services will complement those already offered in the hospital’s cardiac catheterization laboratory.

The procedures will be administered in Stony Brook Southampton’s Audrey and Martin Gruss Heart & Stroke Center, where specialists from the Stony Brook University Heart Institute Heart Rhythm Center will have the ability to identify abnormal heartbeats and then develop a personalized and minimally invasive treatment plan for patients that can be carried out in the heart and stroke center’s advanced endovascular surgical suite.

“For patients and their families living on the East End of Long Island, they no longer have to travel far to get quality heart rhythm care,” said Eric J. Rashba, director of the Stony Brook Heart Rhythm Center and professor of medicine in the Division of Cardiology at Stony Brook Medicine.

Stony Brook Southampton officially joined the Stony Brook Medicine health system last year. The hospital expects to construct a new facility on Stony Brook University’s Southampton campus. The new building, which could take up as much as 14 of the campus’s 88 acres, would replace its existing hospital at 240 Meeting House Lane in Southampton.