A heart for patient care

by Donna Lampkin Stephens

Arkansas Heart Hospital’s Conway clinic opened March 16, but it will be fully staffed beginning Aug. 17 when Dr. Vijay Raja, interventional cardiologist, opens his practice at 605 Dave Ward Drive.

From the time Raja was hired during the winter, the plan has been for him to be the Conway clinic’s lead physician. He is board certified in Internal Medicine and Cardiovascular Diseases and trained to treat all forms of cardiac or peripheral artery blockages.

“This was the Heart Hospital’s plan,” said Raja, 34. “They had a clinic opening, and my schedule is more open than the other physicians’. I’ll be based here three half-days a week, and we’ll do most of the procedures that are done in the Little Rock Clinic or at the (Heart) hospital.”

Monica Sitzer, business development specialist for AHH, said: “We wanted it to be up and running before he got here.”

According to its website, the Conway clinic offers Interventional and General Cardiology, Internal Medicine and is the first in Conway to offer Cardiac Electrophysiology. Among the services offered are echocardiography, treadmill stress testing, ankle-brachial index test, electrocardiograms, peripheral vascular testing and all lab work.

“We’ll do pretty much everything that we do in Little Rock except for the (catheterization) lab,” Raja said. “From what I understand, the Heart Hospital has, in the last six years, had a bigger push to bring medicine to the patient instead of the other way around.”

Arkansas Heart Hospital, founded in 1997 at 1701 South Shackleford Rd. in Little Rock, was the first heart hospital in Arkansas and just the second in the country. Eighteen years later, there are 29 satellite clinic locations: Benton, Cabot, Camden, Clarksville, Crossett, Danville, De Queen, DeWitt, Dumas, El Dorado, Fordyce, Hope, Hot Springs, Little Rock, Magnolia, Malvern, McGehee, Mena, Monticello, Mountain Home, Mountain View, Nashville, North Little Rock, Russellville, Searcy, Warren and two in Helena.

According to its website, “Arkansas Heart Hospital and area heart specialists have joined together with the goal of assembling the finest facilities, most advanced equipment and most highly skilled health care professionals at one site. From the hospital’s inception, physicians have been active in planning our specialized care facility.”

The hospital is “dedicated to the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular disease” and offers “advanced technology teamed with a highly trained support staff and Arkansas’s leading cardiologists and cardiovascular surgeons.”

The hospital features six catheterization labs, three heart operating suites and a 24-hour Heart Emergency Center and is “a training center for physicians from all over the world.”

According to beckershospitalreview.com, AHH was ranked No. 1 on CareChex’s list of Top 50 Hospitals for Cardiac Care in 2014.
Raja was born in New Jersey. His father is an anesthesiologist; his mother is in finance. The family moved to Texas when he was 11.

He went to high school in Beaumont and earned his bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis before going on to Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans. From there he did his post-graduate training (fellowships in cardiology and interventional cardiology) at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. While there, he also earned an MBA from the University of Texas at Dallas.

Why cardiology?

He said his choice was based on a simple but profound appreciation for the heart’s ability to recover.

“Since early in my training, I have seen patients come in with significant cardiac decompensation,” he said. “With the right care and medical support, they often completely recover. This is combined with a vast amount of research-derived therapeutics and ever-evolving technology that makes it an exciting field every day.”

He met his wife, Dr. Grace Raja, a hematologist/oncologist, during his residency. They have a daughter, Lakshmi, 2; and a son, Madan, nearly four months.

Raja arrived in the 501 in mid-July and has spent the first few weeks before officially opening his practice “getting situated, getting organized and meeting different people,” he said. His family will join him after his wife’s contract with UTSMC runs out at the end of August. They will live in Little Rock because of his on-call duties at the hospital. He’ll also have one day a week at the Little Rock clinic.

So how do you start a cardiology practice from scratch?

“I don’t know, but they’re doing an excellent job marketing me and telling people about the skills I have,” he said of the AHH administration and marketing staff. “The institutions where I’ve trained speak for themselves, especially here in the South. I’ve also been going out and meeting some of the referring physicians in the area just to say that I’m here, meet-and-greet kinds of things, in Conway and the surrounding areas as well.”

He said in looking for positions, the couple wanted to find a place where both could practice medicine, although initially, his wife will be focused on the children rather than a full-time position.

“Anywhere was open,” Raja said. “We looked at the major metropolitan areas. She has family on the west coast; I have family on the east coast. I had not considered Little Rock until a couple of my colleagues (at UT-Southwestern, Drs.), Monica Lo and Daniel Sherbet, came here, and they were instrumental in getting me here. They told Dr. (Bruce) Murphy (president and CEO) about me, and he reached out to me.”

He said he came for the interview with “a pretty open mind.”

“Honestly, I was just blown away by the hospita
l, the clinics, the team,” he said. “Everything seemed very supportive. In training, you do a lot of the work yourself; you have to learn every facet of the job, and a lot of it is non-doctor stuff, administrative stuff. In a public hospital, everybody has to do that, but at the same time, you want to be able to do what you’re trained to do, and this hospital lets you do that.

“They take your time away from administrative duties so that you’re able to spend more time with patients and their families.”

He said he found no similar situation at his other interviews.

“That was pretty incredible,” he said. “Everybody is so collegial. It’s like a family, and it’s just not that way at a lot of practices.”

He said he’d never been associated with a hospital that made customer service a priority, as AHH does.

“You get lost in that process of trying to work from patient to patient, but you’ve got people there to back you up, just communicating,” he said. “The capacity here to grow is big.”

Dr. Bruce Murphy, CEO of Arkansas Heart Hospital, said Raja would be a perfect fit for AHH and the 501.

“Dr. Vijay Raja brings to Conway a wonderful physician-to-patient personality that will be loved and sought after,” Murphy said. “He was trained in one of the top-flight cardiology programs in the world and brings technical skills to treat virtually any cardiac problem with the latest minimally invasive approach.

“Arkansas Heart Hospital recruited him knowing what a real impact he will make to the cardiac care the patients in Conway will seek and adore.”

Raja said the couple’s hobbies now are focused on their children.

“But we like to go out and eat and try new restaurants, and we like to be outdoors,” he said. “We used to go running and jogging, but now I’d like to check out some of the trails and things like that here. My wife is a big lake person, a water skier, so this area was kind of perfect. We’ve got a hidden treasure here in Arkansas.”

His goals as he starts to build his practice?

“I just want to have a good balance of work and life,” he said. “We’ve got the two young kids I definitely want to hang out with. I want to grow a practice and be somebody people can depend on.

“One of the cool things I’ve seen with a lot of the physicians I’ve been shadowing here is they’ll introduce me to a patient and then tell me they’ve treated their wife or their daughter. It’s a generational thing, building relationships. From an academic hospital, you see one patient and you may never see him again.”

Raja will build his practice through new patients and emergencies and said he hopes for a long-term residence in the 501.

“If everything works well for this clinic and for me to be here, this could be a longstanding relationship with the community,” he said. “I believe that the Heart Hospital, with its administration, staff and physicians, all help to create the right mixture of clinical care, research, education and collaboration for the best possible results.”

Also practicing at the Conway clinic are Dr. Ian Cawich, Dr. Andrew Henry, Dr. David Mego, Dr. Wilson Wong, Dr. Robert Thurlby and Beth Crowder, APN.

For more information, visit arheart.com or call 501.504.6270.