The Health Department yesterday gave Kent Hospital permission to start performing emergency angioplasty to treat heart attacks, a decision that hospital and health officials said could save lives and reduce disability.

Starting in about three to six months, doctors at Kent, in Warwick, will be able to treat certain types of heart attacks with angioplasty, a procedure in which a slender tube is threaded into the heart’s arteries to open clogs and restore blood flow.

Currently in Rhode Island, only Landmark Medical Center, Miriam Hospital and Rhode Island Hospital perform angioplasty. Kent patients who could benefit from the treatment are sent to Providence, losing valuable time and increasing the risk of damage to the heart muscle.

Kent’s plan is the more expensive of two options for getting heart-attack patients’ arteries opened as quickly as possible. An alternative would be to set up a system to move patients quickly from outlying hospitals to the hospitals that are already doing angioplasty. Sturdy Memorial Hospital, in Attleboro, has successfully worked out such an arrangement with Rhode Island Hospital, located 15 miles away.

Dr. David R. Gifford, health director, said he weighed that option but ultimately was persuaded that Kent’s project, with $76,900 in start-up costs and $387,210 in first-year operating costs, would be worth the price. Ambulance companies from southern Rhode Island testified that it takes too long to get to Rhode Island Hospital, especially when secondary roads are clogged, and the additional 10 to 20 minutes makes a difference in whether the heart muscle suffers damage. Also, traveling to Providence takes ambulances out of their service areas so they are unable to respond to emergencies at home.

Gifford imposed 22 conditions on the project –– an unusually high number and 14 more than recommended by the Health Services Council, the advisory group that reviewed and approved the proposal.

The conditions focus on requiring Kent to ensure that patients who need angioplasty get to Kent without delay. That means training and equipping ambulance companies so they can tell which people need to go to Kent instead of the nearest hospital, and also making arrangements with other hospitals to transfer heart-attack patients who arrive on their own. “If you don’t get them there quickly, you don’t realize the benefits,” Gifford said.

As part of the project, Kent is equipping ambulances with a radio transmitter that enables a physician in Kent’s emergency room to view heart rhythms while the patient is en route. If the patient is a candidate for angioplasty, the doctor can start assembling the treatment team even before the patient arrives.

Kent expects to do a minimum of 60 emergency angioplasties a year; the Health Department is requiring at least 36 a year.

Kent spokesman Brian Wallin said that non-physician personnel involved with the program will undergo training at Rhode Island Hospital. The five doctors who will perform the procedure are already highly experienced; working at other hospitals, each logged between 128 and 240 angioplasty procedures in 2007, Wallin said. The Health Department is requiring that each doctor perform at least 75 angioplasties per year, because doctors who do more procedures tend to have better outcomes.

The angioplasties will be performed in Kent’s cardiac catheterization laboratory, which has performed 13,000 diagnostic procedures since 1989 and is located on the floor directly above the emergency room. Wallin said that if a diagnostic procedure is under way when a heart-attack patient arrives, there will be enough time to complete the procedure without endangering either patient.

Gifford is requiring the hospital to report the number and outcomes of its angioplasty procedures, which he intends to make public. He acknowledged that angioplasty is on the decline nationwide, but said the drop is mostly in elective rather than emergency procedures. Kent has permission only to do emergency angioplasty for heart-attack patients.

“If we have fewer heart attacks, I’m happy to address that problem when we get there,” Gifford said.

ffreyer@projo.com