What makes Gwinnett County different from every other county its size or bigger in the country?

As it happens, it's the only one without a hospital offering life-saving open-heart surgery — something Gwinnett Medical Center is seeking to correct.

The hospital system intends to ask state regulators for permission to establish such a center at its Lawrenceville campus.

"It's just too risky to risk going to Atlanta in our current traffic situation," hospital spokesman Kyle Brogdon said.

Having an open heart surgery center is a national requirement for hospitals offering the most successful treatment for heart attacks, hospital officials said. Without it, Gwinnett Medical Center's doctors use a procedure said to help only 60 percent of the time.

And transferring patients to a hospital that does have open heart surgery is rarely a better option: it takes an average of nearly four hours to get a patient out of Gwinnett County and into a hospital equipped with an open-heart surgery center, according to the hospital.

Read more of this article by Michael Pearson from the September 23, 2007 issue of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.