Skip to Content

Southwest Florida, We Want Your Ideas!

The development of the new Lee Health Fort Myers campus brings an exciting opportunity to rename Challenger Boulevard to align the street name with the values, history, and vision of our community. We invite the community to submit nominations for the renaming, as your involvement in this process is important to us. Submit your nomination here!

Shipley Cardiothoracic Center Announces New Heart Valve Clinic

From Michael DeFrain, Cardiothoracic Surgeon with Lee Health’s Shipley Cardiothoracic Center.

At Shipley Cardiothoracic Center, we are always looking for new and innovative ways to best serve our patients while providing the highest quality of care possible.

Lee Health’s Shipley Cardiothoracic Center is the largest program in the region performing over 1,600 surgical cases annually. The Shipley Cardiothoracic Center is located within HealthPark Medical Center, which is recognized as an IBM Watson Top 50 Cardiovascular Hospital. HealthPark is the only hospital in Florida to receive this recognition for four consecutive years.

I’m proud to announce that Shipley Cardiothoracic Center recently launched a Heart Valve Clinic with a dedicated Heart Team, both of which we are very excited about. It has been extremely successful and is a real elevation of care for our patients.

Shipley Cardiothoracic Center’s Heart Valve Clinic creates a much more coordinated approach to patient care because we bring together a team of experts to review cases, creating a comprehensive, multidisciplinary approach to valve disease. 

For example, if you are a Heart Valve Clinic patient with a complex heart problem, instead of seeing one doctor who determines a care plan for you and then refers you to another specialist, your chart would be presented to the Heart Team, which is comprised of experts like cardiologists, cardiothoracic surgeons, anesthesiologists, operating room staff and nurses, who would all discuss and collaborate on the best approach to care. The patient’s referring physician is also invited to participate in the evaluation. Then, we go over the treatment plan with the patient.

The Heart Team meets regularly through a weekly valve conference and we have seen great results through this innovative approach.

This is truly a team effort. We have taken the best of the best and put them in a team. To have all those talents in one room to collaborate and come up with a plan of care together is remarkable and a huge benefit to our patients.

The new Heart Valve Clinic and Heart Team at Shipley Cardiothoracic Center show our continued dedication to being the premier cardiac surgery program in Southwest Florida.

Our group has a long-standing reputation as a minimally invasive center of excellence. Beginning with valve surgery more than 10 years ago, our program has expanded to include robotic heart surgery, transcatheter valve repair and replacement, and hybrid surgery for the treatment of atrial fibrillation