A Hearty Choice

Venice Regional Medical Center administrators faced a thorny decision seven years ago when they decided to launch a heart surgery unit.

The safe choice would have been to bring on a team of surgeons connected to Sarasota Memorial Hospital, a much larger community medical center 30 miles to the north. The surgeons there were well known, and for the most part, well liked, in the medical community.

A decidedly more risky choice, however, lay in a small team of heart surgeons at the Ocala Heart Institute. The surgeons there had built a successful practice in Ocala and several other rural Florida communities on a theory somewhat out of the cardiovascular mainstream. That theory — modify, simplify and apply — called for the doctors to avoid the overzealousness that can be found in the field.