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Eau Claire Heart Institute founder advanced cardiac care in Valley
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Dr. Abd Khatib, originally from Syria, practiced in Michigan and Ohio before becoming one of the first full-time cardiology specialists in the Eau Claire area. The front office staff in the background includes receptionist Shannon Berman and transcriptionist Jennifer Gindt.
Photo by Mark Gunderman
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By MARK GUNDERMAN / CVBR
It is something almost taken for granted in medical care today. If you are having heart trouble, you go see a cardiologist. There are a number of diagnostic and treatment procedures he or she may order, and the names are familiar by now.
An echocardiogram.
A pacemaker.
Heart catheterization.
Less than a generation ago, not all of that fancy technology was available in the Eau Claire area. As a matter of fact, there was only one half-time cardiologist in Eau Claire when Ronald Reagan served his first term as president.
Then Dr. Abd Khatib came from Detroit, by way of Ohio, and Damascus, Syria.
Dr. Khatib went against the trend of joining a physician group and founded the Eau Claire Heart Institute, on Hamilton Avenue in Eau Claire.
Photo by Mark Gunderman
Meet the man who brought modern heart catheterization technology to the Chippewa Valley, and — against the tide of physician-group medicine — founded the independent Eau Claire Heart Institute
“When I came to Eau Claire, cardiology was 10-15 years behind the rest of the country,” Khatib said.
Well, yes, but it’s not as if people in the Chippewa Valley weren’t getting any cardiology care at all, and it’s not as if Khatib turned things around overnight single-handed. He makes no such claims.
“People were seeing cardiologists in various places,” he said.
That is, places like Rochester, Minneapolis or Madison.
And for Khatib and the other cardiologists who formed the core of the discipline locally in the 1980s, it took some time to change people’s way of thinking to realize they could find good cardiology right here in the Chippewa Valley.
At least one of the ways a patient could find it came from overseas.
From a Syrian middle-class family that valued education, Abd Khatib followed other family members into medicine.
“I have two brothers ahead of me who are physicians,” he said.
Dr. Khatib graduated from Aleppo University Medical School, Aleppo, Syria, in 1974. Classes were taught in English there.
“In Damascus, they taught medicine in Arabic,” he explained.
There’s nothing wrong with Arabic, of course, but in the culture of Syria, the consensus was that if you were a really good doctor, you received training in America, or perhaps Europe. And for training in America, you needed to speak English.
Khatib was accepted for a first year residency at a hospital on Barberton, Ohio, just south of Cleveland. Fellow classmates were also accepted, so the transition to America was eased by the familiarity of people from his home country.
The small-town culture helped, too. He didn’t have to deal with big-city pressures.
“If I hadn’t started in Barberton, it might have been different,” he said. “But the transition was very good.
“It was a community hospital. They provided an apartment, even airplane tickets,” Khatib said. It was similar to Eau Claire, a safe town, he added.
From there he went to Lutheran Medical Center in Cleveland, studying internal medicine for three years.
“The first three months I spent there, they assigned me to the critical care unit,” he said.
That’s when he started to develop an interest in cardiology.
His next step came with a two-year cardiology fellowship at Mt. Carmel Mercy Hospital in Detroit.
When it came time to practice on his own, he looked toward Eau Claire, where his brother had been hired by Sacred Heart Hospital about three years before.
At that time, in 1983, only one physician in town was specializing in cardiology, and he was only doing it half time. Most patients were sent to the larger hospitals in the bigger cities.
Dr. Khatib opened his own cardiology practice full time, renting some space from Sacred Heart Hospital. He practiced there for 20 years.
“When I came here, Luther Hospital had a cath lab opened in the 1970s. They used it for about six months, then the physician who had been using it left,” Khatib said.
The technology was the same as the back-up unit at Mt. Carmel in Detroit. That is, Mt. Carmel had modern facilities and in case those broke down, the old equipment was available for back-up.
That old equipment was what was at Luther and no one was using it.
It wasn’t just the need to modernize in the Chippewa Valley that convinced Khatib he could make it here as a full-time cardiologist. It was the critical need. In cardiology, time is of the essence, and primary care doctors in Rochester and Minneapolis do little good when a patient is having a heart attack in Fall Creek.
“People were dying because they weren’t getting to the right specialist,” he said.
For example, one of the exciting new areas of cardiology was in the use of “clot buster” medications, administered to dissolve a clot during a cardiac emergency. It was new technology when Khatib arrived in Eau Claire.
“I started doing this before people in Rochester were doing this, and before people in Minneapolis were doing this,” he said.
“I believed in it.”
Eventually, more patients stayed in the Chippewa Valley for their cardiac care, and once there was enough volume, Luther bought some new catheterization equipment, and Khatib was the one with experience in the field.
Cardiac care in the Chippewa Valley was coming into its own.
And Dr. Khatib settled into town and into his role as one of the physicians leading the advancement.
Earlier in his career, on a trip back to Syria, he met his wife, Rania. They later settled in Eau Claire, and began to raise a family. They had three children, all of whom are attending college now, and good ones, too. Think Wake Forest, Columbia, Johns Hopkins.
They loved Eau Claire as a good, safe community with good schools.
“It has a nice community feel to it. It’s not like a big city,” said Rania.
Muslims like the Khatibs face greater challenges today because of the way world politics has gone, but they have felt accepted.
“People have accepted diversity very well. Sometimes they are supportive,” said Rania.
They are as active as time permits in the area Mosque in Altoona, and have a number of friends in the local Muslim community. They have more friends, however, in the medical community, probably the most diverse industry in the Chippewa Valley.
Meanwhile, Dr. Khatib found himself in the midst of a powerful trend on the business end of medicine in the Chippewa Valley. Physicians were lining up with either the Luther Midelfort or the Marshfield systems.
Those systems have moved medicine in the Chippewa Valley forward, but some physicians preferred to stay on their own course.
Khatib felt a closer relationship with his patients as an independent physician.
“I know my patients. I don’t mind receiving the phone calls,” he said. “I like to know what happens to my patients. I’m not 8-to-5. I like the 24-7 coverage,” Khatib said.
He later founded the Eau Claire Heart Institute, now located on Hamilton Avenue. His plan is to keep the area moving forward.
What was once a specialty rare in the Chippewa Valley now has sub-specialties, and Khatib wants to recruit those experts to the Chippewa Valley, and to the Eau Claire Heart Institute.
He would especially like to see some expertise in cardiac electrophysiology come to the Valley. Perhaps someday that will be as common a term as heart catheterization.
And by then some other term will describe the next big advancement in cardiac care.
Dr. Khatib plans to stay on the cutting edge of it, as he has since the day he arrived in the Chippewa Valley.
Mark Gunderman is editor of Chippewa Valley Business Report. He can be reached at 715-738-1607 or at mark.gunderman@lee.net.
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