CardiacAssist, a provider of cardiac assist devices, has reported that Baptist Hospital East has adopted the company’s TandemHeart System. The FDA-cleared TandemHeart can be placed rapidly by both cardiac surgeons in an operating room and interventional cardiologists in a cath lab to provide short-term circulatory support for critically ill patients.

CardiacAssist said that the hemodynamic support includes a high net blood-flow rate of up to eight liters per minute in the OR or five liters per minute in the catheterization lab more than twice the amount of other available technologies and is fully reimbursed by Medicare.

Vincent S DeGeare, cardiologist, said: “TandemHeart is at the front lines of helping us treat very sick cardiac patients. If TandemHeart were not available, many patients would not have stayed alive long enough or would not have been healthy enough to get a heart transplant or cardiac procedure. Therefore we are extremely proud to offer this important new life-saving technology to our cardiac patients.”

Headquartered in Pittsburgh, privately held CardiacAssist is a medical technology company that develops, manufactures and markets cardiovascular devices. The company has developed the proprietary platform, FDA-cleared and CE-Marked TandemHeart which provides a short-term extracorporeal circulatory support system for both cardiologists and cardiac surgeons.

Reportedly, TandemHeart is being used in more than 90% of the ‘Best US Heart & Heart Surgery Hospitals’ as ranked by US News & World Report with more than 2,000 TandemHeart procedures performed to date at some 150 hospitals across the US.