Interventional Cardiology (Cath Lab)

The Mount Sinai Hospital's Cardiac Catheterization Laboratory is the nation's best and busiest. The Cath Lab achieved the highest safety rating among New York State institutions that perform percutaneous coronary interventions (PCI), a minimally invasive heart procedure commonly known as angioplasty. This report was made by the New York State Department of Health in January of 2011. No other center has achieved this level of safety rating for both emergency and non-emergency cases since public reporting of PCI results began in 1994. The data compiled by the state, examined patient discharges and compared 30-day risk-adjusted mortality rates among 54 institutions.
Award-Winning Leadership for Safety
Dr. Sharma, newly appointed Director of Clinical Cardiology, President of Mount Sinai Heart Network, Director of Interventional Cardiology, and Zena & Michael A. Wiener Professor of Medicine, was the only physician in the state of New York, awarded a two-star safety rating for both emergency and non-emergency cases, indicating that he has significantly below-average mortality ratings among doctors performing PCI in all cases. Dr. Sharma performs more than 1,500 complex procedures each year. With its continuing growth, the Cath Lab at Mount Sinai Heart has become one of the top five laboratories in the nation, performing more than 5,500 interventions per year for the last five years. The Cath Lab's team of interventionalists, nurses, technicians and support staff is committed to continuous quality improvement and providing excellent patient care. World-class research physicians have recently joined the team to further the lab's efforts to uncover the underlying causes of heart disease and develop targeted tools and procedures to treat its many permutations. Teamwork is what defines the cath lab at Mount Sinai Heart.
Dr. Kini, who was recently appointed the Director of the Catheterization Laboratory, performs more than 1,000 coronary interventions annually (the highest number by a female interventionalist in the United States) with an extremely low complication rate of <0.3 percent. In August of 2009 and February 2010, a New York State report named her as the safest operator among 350 other physicians in the state of New York. She is highly regarded for performing the complex coronary interventions, especially in chronic total occlusions for patients with advanced heart disease with utmost safety and excellent long-term results. She has become the national expert on heart assist devices, including Tandem Heart and Impella, which are crucial for many of these high-risk cases. Dr. Kini also specializes in the non-coronary interventions of mitral and aortic balloon valvuloplasty, and alcohol septal ablation for obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.