Electrician of the Heart

Dr. Ishu Rao sits in front of the window of his fifth-floor office, framed by Ventura’s surrounding honey-colored hillsides and a cloudless cobalt-blue sky cooled by an ocean breeze.

The 39-year-old doctor admits it was in part the idyllic weather and the coastline’s natural beauty that helped lure him from a thriving private practice in Dallas to Community Memorial Hospital, where he has become one of the Central Coast’s leading experts in the field of electrophysiology since his arrival in 2007.

“If you look on coastal California, there are electrophysiologists all over the place except in this area,” says the Santa Barbara resident and father of two. “It’s really an underserved community in a beautiful part of the country.”

One of the most complicated — and relatively new — facets of modern medicine, electrophysiology is the study of the heart’s electrical system.
Rao’s focus is to give treatment to patients suffering from an irregular heartbeat who might otherwise be forced to maintain an often costly regime of heart medication for the rest of their lives.

Rao is so passionate about his work that he has made it a top priority to spread the word that CMH, equipped with a new $700,000 electrophysiology lab, offering high tech treatment for those suffering from an irregular heartbeat.

“What I like to think we did was give the community a local option for advanced medical care that they wouldn’t otherwise have,” says Rao, noting that most local patients have been forced in the past to seek treatment at Los Angeles-based hospitals such as UCLA, Cedars-Sinai or Good Samaritan.

“In the first three months I was here, we did more electrophysiology cases, studies and procedures than the hospital had done in the past 12 months,” he says.

So what keeps the body’s ticker ticking?

The heart emits tiny electrical pulses that control the rhythm of the heart, and a strong heartbeat means a healthy heart. Problems occur, however, when the heart doesn’t tick just the way it should.

A heart that beats too fast makes the body work too hard and leaves a person feeling breathless and tired. When a heart beats too slowly, the blood doesn’t circulate properly and a person will feel dizzy and might faint.

In either instance, it’s known as a heart arrhythmia. And for Rao, fixing an irregular heartbeat is what drives the Pennsylvania native to learn more about the art and craft of his field.

“When people think about the heart, they think about the plumbing. That’s the arteries. Everyone else in town is a plumber, but I’m an electrician,” Rao says with a wry smile. “That’s the easy way of explaining what I do.”

Although Rao offers a simplistic description of what he does, his specialty is ablation procedures, an extremely exacting treatment that requires an immense amount of ongoing professional education, a highly trained support staff and state-of-the-art technology — all of which is available at CMH.

In an ablation procedure, Rao feeds a catheter through an intravenous (IV) line inserted near the groin area. He then carefully guides the catheter through a major vein into the heart.

Once placed within the heart, Rao uses an electrocardiogram — known as an EKG — to electrically stimulate the heart to create a three-dimensional image that shows precisely where the problem resides.

Rao then uses radio-frequency energy to zap the pinhead-sized patch of irregular cells that cause the faulty electrical signals or to block the bad electrical pathways.

“The burn lesions we create are three to five millimeters wide and three to five millimeters deep,” says Rao. “They’re very, very precise so we’re not destroying massive amounts of heart tissue.”

The procedure takes about two hours, Rao says, and patients are required to stay the night in the hospital.

The American Heart Association reports that 2.2 million people in the United States suffer from arrhythmias, and treatment for those affected with irregular heartbeats has typically been through heart medications.

Rao says ablation procedures — 90 percent effective in most cases — eliminate the need for patients to continue heart medications.

Rao also implants defibrillators for patients predisposed to cardiac arrest, bi-ventricular devices to help “resynchronize” the heart’s electrical system and pacemakers.

Because of the demanding nature of electrophysiology and the high-tech hardware needed to perform ablation procedures, Community Memorial Health System not only brought to the Ventura hospital a high-tech electrophysiology lab and Rao’s expertise, but hospital officials made the commitment to surround Rao with a team of highly trained nurses.

Rao says the team started training with him back in Texas months before he even came to Ventura.

“So when I came in 2007, the team not only knew a lot more about electrophysiology, but they also knew what I did and the way that I had learned to do things,” says Rao. “That early training fast-forwarded the development of our program by at least six months.”

Rao says the training, both for himself and his team, continues daily.

“We’re continuing to go through our medical education as we go,” he says. “We create case scenarios with members of our staff so we can continue to improve their knowledge base and their skill set,” says Rao, who admits that he often spends time talking shop during his drive home to his wife, Charlotte, and their two daughters, Leela, 5, and Lola, 3.

“My drive home is about 45 minutes and on any given day, I’ll be on the phone with one of my EP colleagues from around the country talking about what we do,” he says.

Rao’s constant dedication to his profession and commitment each day to be a teacher and a student of electrophysiology have helped him earn a reputation as one of the premier heart doctors on California’s Central Coast.

“Patients don’t generally expect this type of medical care at a community hospital,” Rao says, “but they should. I want to raise the awareness about what we offer, because a lot of people don’t know what we can do right here in Ventura. It’s some of the best medical technology anywhere.”

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