Getting to the Heart of the Matter
Dr. Andres Medina
CV Thoracic Surgery, Vascular Surgery, Lakeland Regional Health
Dr. Mohammed Hassan
CV Thoracic Surgery, Vascular Surgery, Lakeland Regional Health
Inside a hybrid operating room that Dr. Andres Medina helped design and bring to life, cardiologist and cardiothoracic surgeons work side by side to literally bring life to ailing hearts using a technique that Medina helped pioneer and that Dr. Mohammed Hassan and the CVT team use as a minimally invasive alternative to traditional open heart surgery.
The doctors crossed paths earlier in their professional careers at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, and now the dynamic duo have built a program at Lakeland Regional Health that was recently awarded the distinctive and elusive three-star rating from the Society of Thoracic Surgery, placing LRH among the elite for heart bypass surgery in all of North America.
“A big component of our practice is that the surgeons, nursing staff and cardiology team are all a very cohesive group. If you come into the operating room there’s a very friendly environment of people…obviously it’s a high stress environment but having that kind of relationship with people really brings down the tension level and allows us to work better,” says Hassan, who has practiced Cardiothoracic Surgery since 2008 and joined Lakeland Regional Health in 2020.
Medina, who has been practicing in the field for 26 years, including more than 13 at LRH, left a faculty role at the University of Miami to come to Lakeland in part because he saw the hospital had the building blocks necessary to establish a cutting-edge program that could improve outcomes and positively change people’s lives.
“There is enthusiasm from the organization’s administration, which is not found everywhere,” he says. “They have been very receptive from the beginning to invest capital in the appropriate equipment and processes, especially in the beginning when we were building a hybrid OR that didn’t exist.”
At the University of Miami, Medina was one of two surgical investigators in the state of Florida who participated in a trial for what became the FDA-approved transfemoral aortic valve replacement (TAVR) surgery. In layman’s terms, TAVR is a minimally invasive procedure that replaces a diseased aortic valve with a new one made from biological tissue.
Dr. Medina performed the first TAVR procedure in Florida, and since then he has overseen more than 1,000 successful surgeries of that kind at LRH and also trained others in the industry to master the technique.
It’s no surprise to find out that in his early childhood Dr. Medina was always trying to fix things, tinkering with bikes and other odds and ends. His self-driven pursuit of medicine comes in part thanks to his grandfather being a pediatrician and growing up in Texas in the 1980s, a time period when the Texas Medical Center was developing incredible advancements in heart transplants and the science of cardiovascular care.
Although Dr. Hassan’s journey began in his homeland of Egypt, his story is similar. His uncle was an orthopedic surgeon and he was always fascinated by the science and art of surgery.
“Then through volunteering I developed a specific interest in the heart,” he says. “I always felt that the heart had a special place among organs and I felt that kind of fit in with my personality.”
The camaraderie amongst the doctors is clear, and they both have their distinctive interests that fuel them to bring world class care and technology to Lakeland.
Medina loves being part of a growing health care community in a quickly developing region of the country, and he’s hungry to continue to build a team and processes that compares favorably with any CVT team in the county.
Dr. Hassan is especially interested in more minimally invasive valve and lung procedures his team can implement and learning as much as possible about new and more comprehensive treatments for patients suffering from heart failure.
“We want to integrate systems that continue to adapt to the new technologies that are coming out that provide us the ability to do more complex procedures that allow us to take care of sicker patients as we move on,” he says.
Hassan enjoys getting his heart rate up a bit playing tennis with his high school age son, and it’s also a joy for him to offer personal and professional guidance to his three daughters who are all enrolled in the pre-med program at University of South Florida.
Medina says his 17-year-old daughter and 10-year-old son keep him on his toes, and one of his favorite pastimes is fishing, which no surprise, is a gateway for him to use his “problem solver” mentality to contribute expertise to the cause of improving water quality throughout Florida.
“Growing up my brother and I always were thinking of how to fix things or take care of things, and so we always just tried to figure everything out, with my focus being a little more on science.”
“We want to integrate systems that continue to adapt to the new technologies that are coming out that provide us the ability to do more complex procedures that allow us to take care of sicker patients as we move on.”
