The McLeod Cardiovascular Institute is participating in research efforts to collect clinical data that will benefit cardiac patients nationally.  McLeod was invited along with nine high volume, high quality interventional centers in North and South Carolina to be part of the Strategic Transcatheter Evaluation of New Therapies (STENT) Registry.

The hospitals that were selected to participate in the registry are known as centers of excellence.  McLeod is honored to be part of the STENT Registry that serves to help improve the health and lives of future cardiac patients.

Drug-eluting stents were approved for the treatment of previously untreated coronary artery lesions and were developed to address the problem of scar tissue forming around the stent, a condition called restenosis. The drug-eluting stent is coated with a drug, which slowly releases into the vessel to prevent the growth of scar tissue.

 To help produce more data available for studies of this new stent, McLeod was invited to be part of this multi-center registry.  Every patient who receives a drug-eluting stent or any coronary intervention at one of these centers is given an opportunity to participate in the registry.

This registry is real world data. Everyone who we treat medically is tracked.  There are no exclusions. We are not restricted by factors such as age or race that some studies will take into account.  All patients are invited to participate.

This registry requires no changes on the part of the patient.   They follow their regular recovery process and maintain their normal office visits with their cardiologist.  Patients then receive a follow-up phone call at three and nine months to see how their health has been since their treatment.  This also gives them an opportunity to ask questions or voice any concerns with their health.

Outcomes of the patient are tracked at three months, nine months and one year.

During the calls, information is collected about whether the patient has returned to a hospital and was that visit cardiac-related.  They are also questioned as to whether they have experienced any chest pains and on the medications they are taking.

Within a short period of time, thousands of patients have been entered in the data bank.  We are able to keep track of our outcomes, and compare them to those of our peers.  The data will also be used for research purposes, to help further define the role of these new stents in various patient subgroups.