The Board of the Society of Chest Pain Centers has named St. Joseph an official Certified Chest Pain Center with PCI.

The designation reflects the medical center's commitment to a protocol-driven and systematic approach to reduce treatment time during the critical early stages of a heart attack. The additional designation ‘with PCI' illustrates our commitment to conducting percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), also known as catheterization and angioplasty, on patients suffering from heart attack well within the national standard of 90 minutes of arrival at our Emergency Department.

The Chest Pain Center's approach also puts into place systems that enable hospital's to better monitor patients when it is not clear whether they are having a coronary event. Such observation helps ensure that a patient is neither sent home too early nor needlessly admitted.

St. Joseph's multidisciplinary heart care teams remain on call 24-hours a day, 7 days a week. Patients presenting in the ER with chest pain and diagnosed with significant cardiac symptoms go right to the Catheterization lab for intervention, such as angioplasty or stent placement, often in under 60 minutes, far faster than the national standard of 90 minutes.