When it comes to heart health, time means muscle, and Conway Regional Health System wants to ensure Conway and surrounding areas have the best when it comes to cardiovascular care. 

The Conway Regional Cardiovascular Clinic offers complete, unsurpassed care to Conway and surrounding communities, including Greenbrier, Dardanelle and Clinton, through a highly skilled team of interventional cardiologists. 

The team at Conway Regional provides care for a vast majority of cardiac procedures and services. While each doctor brings traditional, cardiology care, each also brings experience in a specialty area that means wider coverage of care. 

Those specialties include pacemakers and defibrillator therapy, vascular procedures in lower extremities, vein insufficiency and more. 

“We’re able to care for most cardiac conditions at this point,” said Rimsha Hasan, M.D. “It means our patients don’t have to travel and can be closer to their family and home during treatment.” 

Don Steely, M.D., who has been a physician at Conway Regional since 1999, said the hospital’s growth in technology has also added to its capabilities and quality of care. Conway Regional has offered emergency angioplasty — a procedure to open blocked arteries as result of a heart attack — since 2001, and has established one of the fastest door-to-balloon ratios in the state. 

“We have an outstanding catheterization lab staff and emergency physicians that have helped us set the standard of care for emergency angioplasty response and success rate,” he said. 

That quality and standard of care is now making its way to surrounding communities. In addition to seeing patients at the Conway Regional Cardiovascular Clinic, the team of cardiologists see patients multiple times a month at Conway Regional clinics in Greenbrier, Dardanelle and Clinton. 

Yalcin Hacioglu, M.D., who travels to Greenbrier to see patients, said it allows Conway Regional to see patients quicker and establish a relationship with those who want to stay close to home for medical services. 

“Some patients don’t want to leave home and go to a doctor’s appointment. It’s easy to refuse going out of town for a specialist appointment because there is no relationship there,” he said. “By going to the patient and relieving that burden of travel, it helps build a connection and instantly improves their medical care.” 

Hasan, who sees patients in Dardanelle, said Conway Regional saw a need for cardiovascular care in each of the communities, and made it a point to bring that care to patients.  

“We’ve seen that patients are appreciative because they are able to receive care close to home,” she said. “It’s advantageous to them because they are able to receive the same quality of care as they would receive at Conway Regional, closer to home.” 

Steely, who has seen patients in Clinton for more than a decade, said it’s hard for most patients to travel to a doctor’s appointment that can take up more than half a day with travel time. 

“This helps us be more accessible to patients in need,” he said. 

Conway Regional Health System offers a variety of non-invasive cardiology procedures that are often the first step in diagnosing a cardiovascular system problem. Those procedures include heart ultrasounds, heart monitoring, stress testing and more. The hospital also offers a variety of cardiac catheterizations procedures which are performed to examine heart function, and cardiovascular imaging to visualize possible blockages or other issues of the heart. 

For more information, visit conwayregional.com/services/heart-care.