Heart Surgery

America's 50 Best Hospitals for Cardiac Surgery™, Healthgrades®, 2019-2023

For five years running, St. Luke's is the only hospital in Missouri named one of America's 50 Best Hospitals for Cardiac Surgery™ by Healthgrades®. The honor places St. Luke's among the top 50 U.S. hospitals for superior results in coronary artery bypass grafting procedures and heart valve surgery.

St. Luke's cardiothoracic surgeons' core mission is to provide all of our heart and lung patients and their families with the best possible care - through outstanding surgical results as well as comprehensive and compassionate care. In more than 25 years, we have performed over 10,000 heart and lung procedures.

The St. Luke’s Hospital Heart & Vascular Institute has earned the top three-star rating from The Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS) for its patient care and outcomes in isolated coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) procedures. The three out of three-star rating, which denotes the highest category of quality, places St. Luke’s Hospital among the elite for heart bypass surgery in the United States and Canada. The STS star rating system is one of the most sophisticated and highly regarded overall measures of quality in health care, rating the benchmarked outcomes of cardiothoracic surgery programs across the United States and Canada. The star rating is calculated using a combination of quality measures for specific procedures performed by an STS Adult Cardiac Surgery Database participant. Historically, approximately 10%–15% of participants receive the three-star rating for isolated CABG surgery.We also have an FDA sanctioned clinical study for Nona-L-Arginine treatment of vein grafts in patients.

We are leaders in off-pump or "beating-heart" procedures in which cardiothoracic surgeons operate on the beating heart, without putting the patient on a heart/lung machine. Nearly 80 percent of surgeries performed at St. Luke's Hospital are done using the beating-heart technique. No other hospital in the greater St. Louis area performs such a high percentage of beating-heart procedures.

St. Luke's provides a full scope of heart surgery procedures, including:

• On-and off-pump coronary artery bypass grafting
• Valve repair or replacement
• MAZE procedure for atrial fibrillation
• WATCHMAN™ device to reduce AFib stroke risk
• Ventricular remodeling
• Aortic aneurysm or dissection repair
• Minimally-invasive lung surgery procedures
• Pacemaker implantation
• Reoperative cardiothoracic surgeries of all types

Cardiovascular surgery patients at St. Luke's Robert Paine, MD Heart Institute are now able to recover from surgery in a newly-constructed Cardiovascular Step-Down Unit. The state-of-the-art private patient rooms offer convenience and streamlined care and are part of the recently named Jack C. Taylor Heart Hospital.

Surgeon Profiles
Cardiothoracic/Neurosurgical/Surgical Intensive Care Unit
Cardiovascular Stepdown Units