photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

A $5 million gift from Lawrence residents Harry and Cindy Herington will jump start a $25 million expansion of the LMH Heart Center. Pictured above of is the LMH's current Health Plaza building on its Maine Street campus, which houses some heart care services currently.

A $5 million gift from a Lawrence couple has an expanded heart center at LMH Health on track to begin construction next year, hospital officials have announced.

Harry and Cindy Herington have committed $5 million to the heart center, which is expected to be a $25 million project on the eastern edge of LMH Health’s Maine Street campus in central Lawrence.

The expanded center will increase the number of heart catheterization labs — the high-tech rooms where blockages can be removed, stents added and other similar heart procedures performed — from one to two.

Hospital leaders said it is easy to understand why that expansion is critical: When you are having a heart emergency, the last thing you want to hear is that you’ll have to wait for the procedure room to be cleared.

“This has a ton of benefits,” Russ Johnson, president and CEO of LMH Health, said in an interview with the Journal-World. “But first off, you always want to be ready for an emergency patient.”

Johnson said the expansion now will allow the hospital to serve its growing caseload of non-emergency heart procedures without worrying about how it would provide treatment if an emergency case came to the hospital while the sole lab was in use. In those cases, sometimes the non-emergency procedure is at a point that it can be suspended, but other times the situation requires the emergency patient to be taken to a hospital in another community.

photo by: Submitted

Cindy and Harry Herington have made a $5 million gift to LMH Health for an expanded heart center.

Harry Herington said such a scenario weighed heavily in his and Cindy’s decision to contribute $5 million to the project, given that every minute really does count when it comes to emergency heart care.

“To have within minutes a hospital you can get the care that you need, that was a driving factor to us,” Harry Herington said in an interview with the Journal-World. “Who do you lose trying to get to Kansas City?”

The health center project also struck a chord with the Heringtons in a way that LMH leaders had no idea of. Hospital officials first approached the couple about the project near Harry’s 65th birthday. That’s the same age that Harry’s father died from heart disease.

“I know firsthand what it can do to a family,” Harry said.

Harry and Cindy Herington are longtime Lawrence residents, having come to the city when Harry attended law school at the University of Kansas in 1990. Prior to that, he was in law enforcement in Wichita and Texas, but decided to become a lawyer after frustration with some aspects of the legal system set in, he said.

His law career started as an attorney for the League of Kansas Municipalities, serving the legal needs of cities across the state. His familiarity with local governments, though, opened up a new door: The emerging world of electronic records for government entities. Harry became the chief executive officer of NIC Inc., which was a publicly traded electronic records company based in Olathe until it was acquired by a fellow technology company in a $2.3 billion deal in 2021.

The couple has lived in Lawrence throughout the entire time, and has been active in other philanthropic projects, but the $5 million commitment is the largest gift they’ve made, and also is one of the largest in the history of the hospital and the LMH Health Foundation.

Harry said the couple stayed in Lawrence because of its strong sense of community, and he said they were drawn to the heart center project, in part, because the emergency aspects of the heart center will serve everyone.

LMH Health, a nonprofit entity, provides about $35 million a year in care to individuals who don’t have insurance or the means to fully pay for services, with much, but not all, of that coming through emergency care.

“Of course, if people are in the emergency room, we don’t check your insurance,” Johnson said. “We don’t do that. But there are hundreds and hundreds of other services that coverage does matter in lots of places. Gifts like this enable the hospital to create a foundation or basis where we can do a project like this and still take care of $35 million in uncompensated care.”

Harry said expanding the emergency capacity of the hospital’s heart care — heart disease in the No. 1 killer both locally and nationally — made a lot of sense.

“We think this will give confidence to the entire community,” Harry said. “It is the entire community that wants to feel that we have the right place to get care.”

While the expanded heart center will improve emergency care scenarios, Johnson said it also will allow the hospital to begin offering a wider range of non-emergency heart services. He said the hospital has been reluctant to allow certain procedures because of the length of time they would occupy LMH’s sole heart catheterization lab. Among the new procedures that will be offered are electrophysiology — procedures related to the electrical activity or rhythm of the heart — and various vascular services.

LMH Health plans to build the $25 million center with $10 million in private gifts and will use debt, hospital reserves and revenues to fund the remaining $15 million. Rebecca Smith, executive director of the LMH Foundation, said the fundraising campaign for the heart center will be the largest in the hospital’s history, but that the Heringtons’ gift has the campaign off to an excellent start.

The gift also is structured in a way to get the project off to a quick start. The gift, which is being coordinated through the couple’s charitable fund at the Douglas County Community Foundation, has already provided the hospital with $1 million to immediately begin work on the project, with the other $4 million to come at various stages of the project.

Johnson said master planning for the project — which likely will require the hospital’s physical therapy department and perhaps other functions to move — is underway. Detailed design work is expected to begin in the next few months. Construction is scheduled to start in 2026 and likely would last for just less than two years.

The project will come on the heels of an $11 million expansion of LMH’s Cancer Center. Work on that center, which is on the west side of the main hospital building, is underway and the center is expected to open this summer.