Why HHC
Safety and quality
Performing complex cardiac procedures outside a hospital does not lower the standard — it raises it. Everything below exists because an outpatient center has to be more deliberate, not less.
How complex care stays safe here
The question every patient and every referring physician should ask about an ambulatory surgery center performing advanced cardiac work is a simple one: what happens if something goes wrong?
The answer is not that nothing ever does. It is that the circumstances under which something could go wrong have been anticipated, rehearsed, and equipped for — and that patients whose risk profile does not fit this setting are identified in advance and treated somewhere else.
- 01
Patient selection
The most important safety decision in outpatient cardiac care is made before the day of the procedure. Written criteria govern who is appropriate for this setting, covering cardiac history, airway and sedation assessment, anticoagulation and bleeding risk, comorbidity, and the support available at home afterward. A patient who does not meet them is done in a hospital instead. That is the criteria working, not failing.
- 02
Standardized peri-procedural protocols
Preoperative and postoperative pathways are written down rather than improvised. They define the workup required before a case, medication and anticoagulation handling, imaging, monitoring during the procedure, the observation period afterward, and the criteria a patient must meet before discharge.
- 03
Emergency preparedness
Complications are uncommon, and the response to them is planned in advance. The center maintains pericardiocentesis capability on site for the rare case of fluid accumulating around the heart, along with emergency transfer protocols and agreements with nearby hospitals so that escalation is a defined pathway rather than a phone call made under pressure.
- 04
Infection prevention
A formal infection-prevention program governs sterile technique, instrument reprocessing, environmental cleaning, antibiotic practice, and surveillance — particularly important where implanted devices are involved.
- 05
Quality assessment and performance improvement
The center runs a QAPI program: outcomes, events, transfers, and infections are tracked, reviewed, and fed back into practice. Measurement is what makes it possible to say anything credible about safety at all.
- 06
Experience as a safety factor
Volume and familiarity matter in procedural medicine. A team that performs cardiac rhythm work every day, in the same rooms, under the same protocols, recognizes problems earlier than a team that encounters them occasionally.
Our Experience
Our procedural experience
Center-reported totals as of August 30, 2026. These figures describe procedure volume, not treatment success rates.
- 1,800
- Ablation procedures performed
- Performed at Heart Health Center, as reported August 30, 2026.
- 1,400
- Heart rhythm device implants
- Pacemakers, defibrillators, and other cardiac rhythm management devices.
- 1,200
- Heart catheterization procedures
- Diagnostic and interventional catheterization procedures.
Network Standards
ACCESS Center of Excellence
The center is a Center of Excellence in ACCESS, a physician-led national infrastructure organization for outpatient electrophysiology. What follows is the designation’s published criteria rather than a description of it, because the criteria are the part you can check.
Disclosure
Dr. Swarup is one of the founders of ACCESS, and ACCESS was developed in part on this center's experience as a purpose-built electrophysiology ASC. We state that before the designation rather than after it. What makes the designation checkable is that its criteria are published and identical for every center in the network — the thresholds below are the same ones any other center is measured against.
Center of Excellence — the top of three tiers
ACCESS Standards runs three levels: Affiliated, Verified, and Center of Excellence. The top tier is reviewed every three years and requires Verified status held for at least twelve months, outcomes at or above the network median for at least six months, an annual scorecard of 95% or better, and demonstrated capacity to mentor newer centers. Those are published thresholds, which is what separates this from a badge.
Best-in-class policies, maintained rather than written once
The center runs the ACCESS policy suite — 161 policies across 14 chapters, with crosswalks to state statute, reviewed and updated annually. A policy binder assembled at licensure and never reopened is a common failure in this setting; this is the opposite arrangement.
Registry participation, on consecutive cases
The center reports into the ACCESS registry, which captures outpatient electrophysiology procedures as consecutive, structured cases. Consecutive is the word that matters: it means the data is not a selected subset, which is the only basis on which outcome comparisons across centers mean anything.
The designation and the registry cover the center's electrophysiology program.
Licensure and accreditation
- The Joint Commission
- Accredited since January 2018. Joint Commission accreditation is earned through on-site survey against national standards and kept through unannounced resurvey — it is a standard the center is held to continuously, not a certificate issued once.
Heart Health Center follows nationally recognized standards for sterile processing, medication safety, anesthesia monitoring, and emergency response. If you are a patient or a referring practice and would like documentation of any of the above, ask us and we will provide it.
Questions about your procedure?
Our team will confirm your date, walk you through preparation, and answer questions about insurance, sedation, and recovery.