At the heart of a revolution

A small team in Greensboro pioneered a new approach to treating heart attacks, transforming what was possible in community medicine — and heart care worldwide.

In 1986, Greensboro drew a young cardiologist, Dr. Thomas D. Stuckey, into the earliest stage of a medical movement — a point when the right hands could drive the next chapter.

When Stuckey arrived at Cone Health — then LeBauer HeartCare — he entered a program where heart care was shifting, guided by colleagues willing to venture into territory others hesitated to enter.

One question was beginning to reshape the field: Across most of the country, when patients came in with a heart attack, hospitals relied on clot-busting medications. Those helped only half the time and carried bleeding risks. What if we could treat a heart attack immediately by opening the blocked artery?

Guiding a catheter into the coronary arteries and inflating a pinpoint balloon to restore blood flow was considered radical.

The commitment to pursue an innovative treatment for heart attacks had taken shape under Drs. Bruce Brodie, Richard Weintraub, Joseph LeBauer and Jeffrey Katz.

Stuckey stepped into and strengthened that ethos. He and Brodie moved the approach from a radical idea to a national standard, transforming the treatment of heart attacks worldwide.

“It didn’t take me more than three or four weeks here to realize that the angioplasty patients were doing a lot better than the ones being treated with clot-busting drugs,” Stuckey recalls. “That innovation is probably the single most important in cardiovascular medicine over the past 50 years.”

“There’s been more than a 90% reduction in heart-attack mortality from 1977 to 2022,” Stuckey adds. “Today we often discharge patients within 24 to 48 hours, and they barely know anything happened.”

In 1991, following this success, Stuckey joined Brodie and cardiovascular nurse Denise Muncy to launch the LeBauer Cardiovascular Research Foundation — opening the door for people across the Piedmont Triad to participate in clinical trials usually reserved for academic centers. 

“We wanted to bring the very best care to this community — and clinical trials were how we did that,” Stuckey says. “We’ve done more than 600 clinical trials since that time.”

That early foundation lives on as the LeBauer-Brodie Center for Cardiovascular Research and Education. Over time, studies have ranged from new stents and pacemakers to drugs that prevent stroke and advanced heart failure therapies — giving patients access to innovations years ahead of widespread adoption.

With each step, more physicians joined the team, drawn to a place where innovation happened daily, and services expanded to Alamance Regional Medical Center.

“You can’t build a program like this without people,” Stuckey says. “And you can’t bring great people here unless they see innovation happening every day.”

The next frontier 

Cone Health’s leaders now see the opportunity not only to save lives in the moment of crisis, but to prevent that crisis from ever occurring.

Nearly half of all adults have high blood pressure, and rates are climbing among children and young adults. While emergency angioplasty and structural heart interventions save lives every day, the next challenge is to reduce the need for them.

“We’re still taking great care of the patient in front of us,” Stuckey says. “But we can also keep someone from becoming that patient in the first place. That’s the next wave.”

Honoring a legacy. Funding the future of heart care.

With Stuckey’s recent retirement, Cone Health is preparing for a generational handoff from one chapter of progress to the next. The system is establishing the Dr. Thomas D. Stuckey Endowed Chair in Cardiovascular Medicine — not to commemorate one career, but to ensure the innovation continues.

An endowed chair is the highest honor a health system can offer a physician leader. Unlike annual funding or temporary grants, it creates a permanent source of support — invested once and generating resources every year.

By fully funding the chair, donors make it possible to:

·       Recruit and retain top physicians from leading training programs nationwide

·       Accelerate clinical trials that bring promising treatments to our community sooner

·       Expand prevention and education programs that reduce heart disease across generations

And, together, we can ensure that the future of heart and vascular care is led by visionaries who will be drawn here not by chance, but by design.