New hybrid operating room gives this Pierce County hospital more options for cardiac care
After several years and about $6 million later, MultiCare Good Samaritan Hospital in Puyallup has achieved a development milestone with a new hybrid operating room.
The room can convert into a cardiac-catheterization room for patients and will include imaging devices for physicians to provide minimally invasive treatment of cardiac and vascular disease in the same setting.
Dr. Vinay Malhotra of MultiCare’s Pulse Heart Institute led the efforts, and the new setting was on display this week for a media preview.
Malhotra discussed how the need for such a hybrid unit with on-demand capabilities has grown, speaking with The News Tribune both on site and in a phone interview Thursday.
“I’ve been here 25 years, and when I put in the first cath lab here, 25 years ago, people didn’t think that we would be that busy,” he said.
“And now we’ve become one of the busiest programs for heart-attack patients in our state.”
Malhotra said that annually, “In the hybrid lab at Tacoma General, we do about 200 to 250 valve cases, and about 200 to 250 other cases.”
Currently, patients under cardiovascular care might have to travel to Tacoma or Seattle for certain procedures as part of their treatment plan.
Malhotra compared Good Sam’s new hybrid operating room to having both an oven and burner in your kitchen, which gives you options over having just one or the other.
“An OR is capable of doing surgeries. If you have a robot, for example, then you can do something more than what you’ve traditionally used working in that space,” he said. “It’s the same concept here.”
In this case, advanced monitoring was lacking.
With the new monitoring at the ready, “procedures that would have normally required sending a patient out of the community to a different facility now can be done here safely by the same people,” Malhotra said.
This level of one-stop availability is important as cardiac treatment moves away from invasive surgeries to more vascular approaches, known as percutaneous procedures, which are considered minimally invasive.
Such procedures are accomplished through needles, such as in opening blocked arteries.
With the hybrid operating room’s capabilities, they can more efficiently take on on heart valve work, “close a hole in the heart or perform vascular procedures,” Malhotra explained, “which normally would have required more intense work here because of lack of availability of equipment and requiring the patient to be transferred to the Seattle area or Tacoma.”
For example, “If you were in a cath lab, which is the old way of doing it, you only have the capability of putting in a stent,” he said. “But if something went (wrong), you would have to move the patient emergently to a different location ... to open the patient up and fix it.
“Now, if something happens, you can do it right there. You can combine the two capabilities ... in one space.”
Malhotra noted that money for the unit came from fundraising through Multicare’s Good Samaritan Foundation.
“It’s the community that has supported it, which I think brings everybody in as a team,” he said.
“This is very big for our community, where we can deal with advanced cardiovascular cases, keep it in the community and make sure people have access to it,” he added.
The Good Sam unit will begin taking patients in March, following completion of monitor installation.
This story was originally published February 21, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
