Working within the system
March 24, 2011On who you trust
April 11, 2011
Another note to say hello. I hope you all are doing well. I am writing this on the plane back to Vancouver from New Orleans. I had the privilege of attending the American College of Cardiology annual conference. This was the first time I had been to the ACC meeting and I found it very useful for my practice.
One thing I enjoyed from the conference was the report of the PARTNER trial regarding transcutaneous aortic valve replacement. This trial showed that less invasive valve replacement was not inferior to more traditional open heart valve replacement in terms of outcomes for patients at 1-2 years after follow up. Patients in this trial were considered relatively high risk for conventional surgery. In BC we are limited by reimbursement which is currently only provided for patients who are deemed to be at prohibatively high risk for conventional surgery. I wonder if this will change after this trial?
This conference also had a great session on sports cardiology. I provide cardiology screening for the Vancouver Whitecaps soccer team. It was useful to review these difficult cases other cardiologists had dealt with. Most of the time in sports screening there is not much to do, the athletes are quite healthy. You are looking for the rare condition that has been undiagnosed, where if you miss it, the patient could suffer a very serious outcome. It is nice to belong to a network of experts to discuss these difficult cases.
There were many other good sessions, nice reviews of some echo and EKG cases and some good data. In general it was a great conference! And of course it was in New Orleans which is probably my favourite US city. Great restaurants and fun to be had throughout the city!
Tomorrow it is back to work. I had to move a few patients because the conference became an option for me at the last minute. I am sorry for this inconvenience to those patients and I will work extra, including Monday afternoons which I usually do not work, to make up the time.
Until next time,
John Vyselaar, MD, FRCPC
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1 Comment
Interesting info John 🙂