Putting Our Heads Together: The Neuroscience Institute at Hartford Hospital
Hartford HealthCare is building a premier, nationally recognized Neuroscience Institute whose vision is to rival and partner with the top names in the country, while being acknowledged as the regional leader in patient-centered, innovative care.
Each year, more than 50 million Americans experience a disorder of the brain or nervous system, including strokes, brain tumors, chronic headaches, spinal cord injuries, severe back and neck pain, seizures, Parkinson’s disease, and memory, sleep and movement disorders. Hartford Hospital’s Neuroscience Institute offers these patients specialty care to treat and manage their symptoms and allow them to live a healthier life. In specialized comprehensive treatment centers, the Institutes’s physicians utilize state-of-the-art technology and techniques, and some of the most advanced treatments available in the nation, all aimed at giving every patient the best possible outcome.
Hartford Hospital’s neurosurgery program
The neurosurgical program provides care to patients with injury to and diseases of the brain, spine, and peripheral nerves, including head and spinal trauma, cerebrovascular disorders, brain and spinal tumors, movement disorders, skull-based diseases, epilepsy, stroke, aneurysm, and neck and back pain. The program has one of the highest surgical volumes in New England, with over 1,700 surgical cases per year. The hospital provides a 24/7 neurosurgery call team and 24/7 in-house neurosurgical physician assistants. A state-of-the-art neurosurgical intensive care unit combines a multidisciplinary team approach, allowing streamlined and high-quality care.
Comprehensive Stroke Center
A stroke is a medical emergency usually caused by a blood clot blocking a blood vessel in the brain. Every minute that passes from the onset of stroke symptoms to the start of treatment can make a difference in how well a patient’s brain, arms, legs, speech or thinking ability recover. The Comprehensive Stroke Center at Hartford Hospital offers patients fast access to the best available treatments, from delivering clot-busting medications; to pulling clots mechanically from a catheter; or surgically treating brain bleeds. The Comprehensive Stroke Center is the largest stroke center in New England, with approximately 1,000 cases per year. The center includes a multidisciplinary team of care providers, two dedicated angiography suites, 24/7 advanced imaging capabilities, a neurovascular clinic, and a unique telehealth network. Hartford Hospital conducts a stroke research program, with numerous clinical trials, publications, and investigator-initiated projects.
Sleep Disorders Program
Hartford Hospital’s Sleep Disorders Program provides a comprehensive and personalized approach to the care of patients being tested and treated for obstructive sleep apnea and other sleep disorders. Hartford Hospital sleep labs are accredited by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and house state-of-the-art equipment. The sleep labs perform over 2,000 studies annually, offering in-lab as well as home sleep testing.
Comprehensive Epilepsy Center
Hartford Hospital’s Comprehensive Epilepsy Center offers individualized, coordinated care through a team of epilepsy experts, a dedicated six-bed inpatient epilepsy monitoring unit, an outpatient seizure clinic, and outpatient neurodiagnostic capabilities. It is at the forefront in delivering cutting-edge diagnosis and treatment for the most complex cases of epilepsy, a disorder in which nerve cell activity in the brain is disturbed, causing seizures. The Epilepsy Center has aspirations of becoming a level IV Comprehensive Epilepsy Center, offering a full complement of care to patients in the state and beyond.
Hearing & Balance Center
The Hearing & Balance Center provides comprehensive services that include inner-ear balance testing, access to physical therapy, and advanced therapies for patients with hearing loss or deafness not related to balance disorders. The center’s patients have access to bone-anchored hearing aids, cochlear implants, conventional hearing aids, and advanced surgeries. The Hearing & Balance Center also operates a Dizziness Clinic, which provides an interdisciplinary network of care providers and treatments tailored for the specific diagnoses associated with vertigo.
Headache Center
About 36 million people in the United States, the vast majority of them women, suffer from debilitating migraine headaches. The specialists at the Hartford HealthCare Headache Center examine triggers and symptoms to find the most effective treatment options for each individual. We offer many of the most current techniques available such as Botox injections, bio-behavioral stress reduction, occipital and other peripheral nerve blocks, and trigger point injections. For those with headaches that are particularly debilitating, relentless or nausea-producing, the center is one of very few places in the country offering intravenous drug infusion therapy.
Movement Disorders Center
The Movement Disorders Center gives patients with Parkinson’s disease and other movement disorders a path to improved quality of life with treatment options that range from medication to neurosurgery. The region’s first facility of its type, the center combines the diagnostic and therapeutic skills of prominent specialists with ongoing clinical research to provide effective treatment for movement disorders. The center offers a personal and compassionate approach to a comprehensive treatment, while embedding interprofessional services to provide care along the entire continuum. Treatment plans include collaboration with alternative therapies, palliative care, physiatry/EMG, rehabilitative services, neuropsychology, health psychology, dementia services, social services, dermatology and, primary care physicians.