This KC institution bested the big guys at a major cardiovascular conference

Among the more than 10,000 people at this year’s Cardiovascular Research Foundation TCT conference, one face stood out.

Tom Hanks was the celebrity guest at the conference, which was held in Denver Oct. 29 through Nov. 2, and drew people from more than 90 countries.

But medical professionals were likely to focus more on studies from some of the greatest institutions in the world — among them St. Luke’s Hospital in Kansas City.

Each year, hosts of the conference pick 12 late-breaking clinical trials to feature. This year, they picked two studies from St. Luke’s.

The others came from places like Stanford University Medical Center, Columbia University Medical Center, the Imperial College of London and the University of Leipzig in Germany. No other institution had two studies selected.

“I think it’s a reflection of the overall quality of the research program,” St. Luke’s cardiologist David Cohen said. “We’re recognized and they know our work is high-quality.”

The St. Luke’s studies featured at this week’s conference were led by Cohen and Suzanne Baron.

Both focus on improving outcomes and quality of life after heart surgery: studying whether less-invasive procedures, which shave days off hospitalizations and thousands of dollars off medical costs, can perform just as well as more drastic surgeries.

The studies are products of decades of investment from St. Luke’s and outside groups that has helped draw researchers from big-name institutions to Kansas City.

St. Luke’s emphasis on cardiac research started when University of Kansas Medical School graduate Ben McCallister returned to Kansas City after training at the Mayo Clinic. He helped found the Mid-America Heart Institute at St. Luke’s in the late 1970s.

Under McCallister and cardiologist John Spertus, the hospital started a cardiac outcomes research program that has received more than $30 million in grant funding from the National Institutes of Health, the American Heart Association and medical companies.

The heart association chose St. Luke’s in 2001 to be the center of a 60-hospital cardiac outcomes research consortium.

“Early on it was clear that the folks there in Kansas City at the MAHI (Mid-America Heart Institute) and St. Luke’s were doing really terrific and groundbreaking work in this area,” said Rose Marie Robertson, the chief science and medical officer for the American Heart Association.

“So, they were a very important part of a network of institutions that we funded to work together.”

The institute has since brought in a stable of researchers with Ivy League credentials. Baron went to medical school at Yale University and did multiple research fellowships at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard.

Mikhail Kosiborod, a St. Luke’s cardiologist who also trained at Yale, studies cardiac complications in patients with diabetes.

He said it’s the leading cause of death for people with that condition.

“Probably one of the biggest public health priorities worldwide is to try to understand what can be done about it,” Kosiborod said.

Cohen came to St. Luke’s from Harvard in 2006, the same year McCallister, who died in 2012, was named a Master of the American College of Cardiology.

Cohen said that he was a researcher at Harvard in the 1990s, looking for a tool to measure quality of life in cardiac patients when he saw a presentation by Spertus, who was developing one at St. Luke’s.

They began collaborating and eventually McCallister and Spertus pitched Cohen and his research team on coming to work for St. Luke’s full time. Cohen said that when he told his Harvard colleagues he was moving to Kansas City, several reacted with disbelief.

“‘You’ll be back in a year,’ is what they said,” Cohen said. “Here I am, 11 years later, and it’s been great.”

Spertus helped recruit several of the Ivy League alums to St. Luke’s, but his arrival in 1997 after training in San Francisco and Seattle came under more humble circumstances.

“I sent out a bunch of applications and basically, this was the only job I got,” Spertus said.

Spertus said he applied to major academic medical centers, but they weren’t interested in the outcomes research he wanted to do. St. Luke’s, on the other hand, was already developing a database to facilitate it.

Research on population health has become more popular since, with the rise in managed-care insurance plans that factor patient outcomes into reimbursements rather than basing them solely on how many services are provided.

In 2015, the American Heart Association gave Spertus a lifetime achievement award for his work. He said he’s had opportunities to leave for bigger-name institutions, but St. Luke’s is a better fit.

“I don’t know if it’s a Midwest culture or if it’s unique to this particular health system, but on the coasts at a lot of the traditional academic places, if you wanted to really affect change or you wanted to do a certain project, there would be so many barriers,” Spertus said.

“There would be all these different silos and you’d have to pay academic homage to the director of every clinic. Here, the attitude was much more like, ‘Oh, that’s a great idea, how can I help?’”

This story was originally published November 3, 2017 at 12:40 PM with the headline "This KC institution bested the big guys at a major cardiovascular conference."