Saint Alphonsus Medical Center-Baker City has opened a cardiovascular rehabilitation program suite for patients who are recovering from a heart attack, bypass surgery or other related issues.

Jennifer Myers, manager for rehabilitation and non-invasive cardiology, said this is something she is really passionate about.

“And just really excited to be able to offer this service to the community and surrounding area,” Myers said.

The suite offers cardiac and pulmonary rehab, a secondary prevention program that mainly targets patients who have recently gone through events such as a heart attack, coronary artery stent placement, open heart surgery or heart transplant.

The program works with a multidisciplinary team consisting of exercise physiologists, nurses, dieticians and others who work with patients to develop a program for them over 36 sessions.

“That enables them to not only recover from their event, but teaches them about healthier lifestyle choices, works with them on making the right dietary choices, educates people on how they can improve their overall lifestyle and continue to recover from either their cardiac event or their pulmonary event,” Myers said.

The suite is in the Baker City hospital.

Myers said Dr. Matt Nelson and Dr. Josh Holweger support patients from Boise, and they have an advanced practitioner, Amber Kirtley-Perez, who is part of the intake program.

She gave an example of a patient recovering from open heart surgery, who would have a follow up appointment with the cardiology practitioners. Perez would do their intake and go through their follow up needs.

“They would do their exercise assessment there in Boise and then they could be deployed to our program in Baker City,” Myers said.

Myers has been working on this program for nine months. She had taken over cardiac rehab 18 months ago and this program has been on her radar.

“It wasn’t something I could feasibly pull off until about nine months ago. We needed to get the right amount of staff, the right mix of our workflow, so it was something we’d been building towards for a while,” Myers said.

She brought echo services and vascular services to Baker about three years ago and she was comfortable with doing the same thing with this program.

“We just always knew that the patients were there, we knew they weren’t coming to Ontario or obviously Nampa or Boise, but having them come to our main hospitals for heart attacks and other heart procedures, we’re able to know where patients live, we’re able to know what our reach is for surgical heart types of patients. We knew that there was a gap and that we needed to work hard to get this service out there,” Myers said.

As Saint Alphonsus was setting up the program, there were 77 patients on a waiting list.

Myers said the Baker City suite can accommodate up to 30 people on exercise days.

“It’ll be helping quite a few folks in the region,” Myers said. “It’s preventative, so it’s going to help patients not only recover from their event, but it’s also going to help keep them out of the hospital.

“We do look closely at the types of patients that we serve and we try to be mindful about programs that are relevant to those communities and this particular program is really going to help out Baker City and the surrounding community,” Myers said.