In the News

Medical device spares little girl from open-heart surgery

A baby born with a hole in her heart faced open-heart surgery when it hadn’t closed by age 3. The hole was causing her heart to get bigger, requiring medical intervention. Rather than performing open-heart surgery, resulting in a long recovery and permanent scarring, Jeremy Ringewald, M.D., pediatric cardiologist at Pediatric Cardiology Associates in Tampa, Florida, part of the Mednax® family, and medical director of the cardiac catheterization lab at St. Joseph’s Children’s Hospital, used an Amplatzer closure device to repair the child’s heart. “I was actually the first doctor to see Piper after she was born and told her folks she had this hole,” he said. “Piper was the smallest and the youngest that we’ve tried to do this on thus far.”

View the full story on Bay News 9