By Caiti Bobbitt After years of planning and construction, an additional 37,000 square feet have been added to the Kootenai Health Heart Center, including nine new patient rooms, a second cardiac catheterization lab and a second electrophysiology lab for heart rhythm disorders. “What that means for our community is that we have improved our ability to care for you and your family members,” said Eric Wallace, D.O., medical director of interventional cardiology at Kootenai Health. Groundbreaking for the expansion project was in June 2021, and it was officially complete in October 2023. Thank you! The Kootenai Health Heart Center received support from generous donors in our community through the Kootenai Health Foundation. To learn more about supporting needed health care services in our community, visit KootenaiHealthFoundation.org. With the additional space, the heart team is able to perform more procedures, decrease patient wait times and produce better patient outcomes. To put into perspective the benefit the expansion has already had, the Heart Center performed 298 more procedures in October through December of 2023 than during the same time frame last year. “The goal of the Heart Center expansion—and all of our expansion projects, for that matter—is to better care for our ever-growing population, and it is doing just that,” said Jeremy Evans, Kootenai Health’s chief operating officer. “Our goal is to always be ahead of the growth.” ALWAYS One Beat Ahead 6
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