Dr. Chris Pierce, ’95, has brought a new heart ablation procedure to North Dakota.
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| Mie and Chris Pierce and family |
When Chris Pierce, a cardiologist and electrophysiologist at Sanford Health in Fargo, first read about a new freezing procedure being used to correct irregular heart rhythms. He was intrigued. Already being used in Europe, the procedure was just approved in the United States this year, and it sounded promising.
“Medicine is a constantly evolving field,” Pierce acknowledges. “There have been a lot of advances (in cardiology) since I started doing it. That’s the way it goes; things evolve and you need to keep up.”
As an electrophysiologist, Pierce fixes electrical problems of the heart—for example, slow heartbeats, fast heartbeats, rhythms that cause people to pass out. He had been correcting irregular heart rhythms with a procedure that essentially burned irregular heart tissue, but there were risks and the procedure took six hours—a physical and emotional toll on the patient and himself. By using the new freezing procedure, Pierce could cut the procedure time in half. He convinced Sanford to invest in the expensive equipment.
Start of a Journey
It’s no surprise that Pierce keeps up on the latest medical technologies through reading. When he was a kid, his mom, who went to nursing school, bought him an anatomy and physiology book to read. “She really planted the seed,” he said. “She always thought medicine was a noble profession.”
He attended medical school at the UND School of Medicine and Health Sciences, earning his degree in 1995. He remembers the heavy emphasis back then on lectures in the first two years, and more so enjoyed the clinical experiences that followed. He completed his Internal Medicine residency in Fargo.
He was inspired to pursue electrophysiology while completing a cardiology fellowship at Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center (now Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center) in Phoenix. “Almost [all of the fellows] did interventional cardiology, which focuses on inserting stents,” he said. “I had a fellowship director, Dr. Kenneth Desser. He was incredible at reading electrocardiograms. He could read each rhythm in a second, or he’d read them upside down even though we’d given him 100 EKGs. He had a great teaching style. I was very fortunate in that they had a lot of really good electrophysiologists in Phoenix, but no other fellows wanted to do it. So I got to do everything, and it was great exposure.”
He completed an electrophysiology fellowship at the University of Minnesota Medical Center–Fairview in Minneapolis and began conducting heart ablation procedures for Sanford. Pierce along with Dr. Manuel Otero performed the first heart ablation procedure in North Dakota. There is only one other electrophysiologist in the state. In July, Pierce became the first doctor in the state to perform heart ablation surgery using freezing instead of burning.
