Cooper University Health Care Opens Advanced Cardiac Care Unit in Camden

Cooper University Health Care opened a new advanced cardiac care unit at its Camden campus this week, adding two catheterization labs and a dedicated heart failure recovery wing designed to reduce readmission rates among cardiac patients in South Jersey.

The unit's heart failure recovery wing pairs patients with a cardiology-trained care team through the first 30 days after discharge, including scheduled check-ins and rapid access to same-week follow-up appointments if symptoms worsen. Hospital officials say the approach directly targets one of cardiology's most persistent challenges: patients readmitted within a month of leaving the hospital.

"Getting a patient stabilized and discharged is only half the job," said Cooper University Health Care Chief of Cardiology Dr. Marcus Whitfield. "The first month after a heart failure hospitalization is when things most often go wrong again, so we built a program specifically to catch problems in that window before they turn into another emergency room visit."

The $95 million project also expanded Cooper's catheterization capacity by 50 percent, addressing scheduling backlogs that hospital data shows had pushed some non-emergency procedures out by several weeks. Cooper serves as one of the primary tertiary cardiac referral centers for South Jersey and parts of the Philadelphia suburbs.

Hospital officials say early readmission data from a pilot version of the recovery program showed a meaningful reduction in 30-day readmissions, a result they hope to replicate at full scale following the unit's expansion.