16 Cone Health Philanthropy At the heart of a revolution Creating a pathway for discovery By the early 1990s, the team was ready to take its work to the next level. In 1991, Stuckey joined Brodie and cardiovascular nurse Denise Muncy to launch the LeBauer Cardiovascular Research Foundation — a private nonprofit that soon became a regional engine, 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. Over time, the studies 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. “We’ve done more than 600 clinical trials since then,” he says. “All of them designed to make care better for this community.” That early foundation lives on as the LeBauer-Brodie Center for Cardiovascular Research and Education, which continues to set the pace for cardiovascular care across the region and beyond. A culture that attracts talent By the mid-1990s, Cone Health had helped shift national treatment norms: opening heart-attack arteries with a balloon was no longer an experiment — it was just as Stuckey and Brodie had hoped. It had become the standard. New advances in heart and vascular followed: The country’s first stents for heart attacks, tested and placed in Greensboro The approval of defibrillators to prevent sudden cardiac death The introduction of leadless pacemakers, with Cone Health among the first U.S. centers to offer this technology Clinical strategies to keep patients out of the hospital, from injectable diuretics to rhythm-restoring therapies delivered in the emergency room 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 ripple effect shows up everywhere — in heart failure, electrophysiology, structural heart, prevention, imaging — fields that now stand on foundations the early team laid. Dr. Jake Hochrein currently leads the Heart and Vascular Service Line and sees that foundation at work every day. He first heard Cone Health’s name as a medical student rounding at Duke University with cardiologist and future FDA Commissioner Robert Califf, who told him, “If you’re having a heart attack in North Carolina, you want to be at Moses Cone Hospital.” Nearly three decades later, Hochrein (pictured on page 18 with Dr. Stuckey) attests that sentiment still holds — not only in the cath lab, but across a program that has grown broader, deeper and more collaborative every year. Cone Health’s newest recruits are drawn to that same current that drew Stuckey decades ago: physicians who could build careers anywhere and choose Cone Health because the work feels purposeful and the culture supports big ambition and teamwork. “That doesn’t happen everywhere, but I’m excited it’s happening here. It’s not easy to pull off,” Stuckey says. He and his wife, Diana, made a gift to support continued team-based care by funding the Heart & Vascular Innovation Room. In this space, teams plan care for complex cases, evaluate new technologies and shape system-wide strategy together. That teamwork leads to continued success in patient outcomes. Patients at Cone Health receive some of the most advanced heart and vascular care available anywhere. Breakthrough devices such as Barostim and ECMO support. One early survivor — Greensboro News & Record columnist Martha Long — shared her experience publicly, helping readers recognize what was changing around them. A patient of Drs. Stuckey and Brodie, she was one of the first of thousands to feel the impact of this new way of treating heart attacks.
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