Cardiovascular Care Hitting Milestones for Rural Communities

By Misty Cryer

Back in 2023, Dr. Amanda Ryan shared news of the construction of a facility to house her private practice, Advanced Heart and Vascular Center of New Mexico (AHVNM), and a state-of-the-art outpatient cardiovascular surgical center owned by her and local philanthropists, Clay and Linda Wilson.

Around the same time, Partners in Heart Health, a foundation that promotes the fight against cardiovascular disease in the community, helps patients afford cardiovascular care and sustains staff and healthcare development in the community, was founded.

Most recently, the prior AHVNM practice merged with Current Clinic. “The promise of Current Clinic is really to bring quality electrophysiology (EP), that’s the area of cardiology that deals with heart rhythm problems like atrial fibrillation (AFib), pacemakers and special kinds of devices that help our rhythms, and improving access to care,” said Dr. Ryan. “We started in January. We have already helped 100 patients with procedures,” she said.

As an interventional cardiologist who puts stents in and treats heart attacks, Dr. Ryan said, “There are about 6,000 of us in the country, and that’s a shortage.” In comparison, she said, “In electrophysiology, there’s only about 2,000.” This nationwide shortage of interventional cardiologists and electrophysiologists particularly affects rural communities.

“We have five electrophysiologists, all of them are top quality,” said Dr. Ryan, about the physicians of Current Clinic. She explained that the physicians have a home base and travel to Carlsbad to provide these services every other week for three days each, so they are here about six days a month.

“It is somewhat a novel concept to get them to surgical centers and hospital systems, particularly in rural areas that are a little harder to reach,” said Dr. Ryan. “Dr. Amin, our Chief Medical Officer, it is kind of part of his concept too.”

Dr. Anish Amin is one of the five electrophysiologists. She said that he is big in academics, doing a large volume, and is also involved in high-level research throughout the world; however, he realizes that when centered at one big academic center and waiting for patients to come to you, you miss a decent amount of the patients.

There are special procedures for atrial fibrillation, which is an irregular heartbeat that contributes to heart failure and strokes. “In 2023, the guidelines really changed to more of an approach that is called an ablation where you go and try to get rid of all those extra impulses,” said Dr. Ryan. She said that with technology advancing at the same time, they are now able to do procedures that have a much lower chance of complications on an outpatient basis at a surgical center, with less time for recovery, where the patient can go home the same day.

Current Clinic has a full, accredited surgical center, said Dr. Ryan, explaining that standards must be met to be able to do these procedures. “We have an accrediting body called the AAAHC (Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care) to make sure that we are meeting those standards,” she said.

Explaining that there is an inpatient list of procedures, like open heart surgery and major abdominal surgeries, which must be done inpatient, everything that is not on the list of procedures can be done at the surgical center level.

Current Clinic also has a nurse-driven EP clinic. “We have nurses, nurse practitioners, as well as our physicians that are all available to see patients within one to two days for arrhythmia services,” said Dr. Ryan, explaining that could be anything with AFib, pacemakers, and defibrillators. She said they are getting patients in for procedures on average within six weeks.

The electrophysiologists use the two Cath labs and the procedure room that Dr. Ryan uses when they are not here. “We recently added a heart CT scanner to our facility, so we did add-on to the building for that, and that’s pretty amazing,” she said.

Patients benefit from lower costs in an outpatient setting with the same quality and faster access, which Dr. Ryan said is really the goal. “I think this is a movement toward the future of rural healthcare, trying to think outside the box,” she said.

While this is great for residents of Carlsbad who previously had to travel three to five hours for these procedures, often waiting six months to a year, the vision is bigger. “The Current Clinic’s mission is to help match up electrophysiologists with programs throughout the country where there is a real shortage with a lot of patients to be served,” said Dr. Ryan