Heart of New Ulm aims to eliminate deaths from heart attacks

In June, Allina Hospitals & Clinics and Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation, in partnership with New Ulm Medical Center, announced the Heart of New Ulm project. This project aims to eliminate deaths from heart attacks and ultimately prevent heart attacks altogether among residents of New Ulm.

Kevin Graham, MD, spoke to a group of community members at a New Ulm Chamber event in August regarding the Heart of New Ulm project.

Zero heart attacks sounds like a lofty goal – and to some it is. To others, it’s the next step in an exciting progression of heart care milestones in the history of health care.

“When I started as a physician in 1981, a patient would come in with a heart attack and would put them in the hospital and watch them have their heart attack,” said internal medicine specialist Daniel Groebner, MD. “We would make them as comfortable as possible, but there wasn’t much more we could do for them. Then we got clot-busting drugs, stents and helicopters to airlift patients to the cardiac catheter lab at Abbott Northwestern Hospital with phenomenal speed.”

“But the problem is--people keep having heart attacks. We’ve been chipping away at high blood pressure and cholesterol, but this goal of eliminating heart attacks is a necessary next step,” Groebner said. “We’re really doing this for the next generation – we’re doing this for our kids.”

“We know that intervention works,” said Kevin Graham, MD, a cardiologist with the Minneapolis Heart Institute. “This is an attempt to bring intervention to an entire town and in such a way that can be mimicked in other cities large and small.”

But, how to get to this next step? Allina Hospitals & Clinics has pledged $1-2 million per year over the next five years to this project. The Abbott Northwestern Foundation and the Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation (MHIF) are seeking matching funding for the project.

The MHIF is the engineer of the project and will be heavily involved in the research and implementation of the program. They acknowledge that this will be a long-term project and that they are in for the long haul. The initial plan for the Heart of New Ulm maps out strategies for the next five years. Beyond that, the goal is that heart-healthy lifestyles will become a way of life in New Ulm.

The practical first step of the project is to hire a director, which has been accomplished. Jeff VanWormer starts his position September 8. VanWormer will develop a staff for the program and various committees who will oversee the work done throughout the community. What exactly that work is will largely be determined over the next few months, starting with a pinnacle event in the fall referred to as “The Summit.”

The Summit will bring together leaders not only in the New Ulm community, but leaders from across the nation in the areas of physical activity, public health, nutrition, behavior science, anthropology, architecture and community planning, social science, health care, genetics and genomics, epidemiology and cardiovascular disease. The approach of looking at the issue with a broad viewpoint is becoming a trademark of the project, with the steering committee consisting not only of NUMC staff, but also representatives from New Ulm schools, Parks and Recreation, Brown County Public Health, community business leaders and the Minneapolis Heart Institute.

The planning phase of the project is underway and a steering committee has been formed. The intervention phase of the project does not start until January 2009, Dr. Graham notes. “It’s important to identify those in the community who could benefit from interventions, but may not be the most obvious heart-endangered patients.”

“It’s easy to identify those who are at low risk and at high risk. We need to do a better job of identifying the middle-of-the-road people and intervening on them,” Graham said. “That may be where we can make the biggest impact in reducing the incidence of heart disease.”

Graham cites several effective tests that can be done to identify those moderately at-risk people and the power of New Ulm Medical Center’s electronic medical record to track those patients. The challenge will be to take the interventions to those patients in an effective way.

“For this project to be successful, we need to look beyond the typical interventions of telling people to stop smoking and lose weight,” Groebner said. “We need to examine the problem from all aspects of life and interventions that can be happening all over the community – in the grocery stores, restaurants, worksite break rooms and recreation facilities.”

The city of New Ulm was chosen as the site for this project because more than 90 percent of its citizens get their health care from NUMC. Because NUMC is fully integrated with an electronic medical record, it also provides an unprecedented opportunity for tracking and research on the health of the population.

“We’re excited to be part of a project that may have national, if not international, implications,” Groebner said. “What we discover in New Ulm over the next several years in terms of best of practices in heart attack intervention may become a model for better health the world over.”

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