Several cardiologist leaders have joined Becker's "Cardiology and Heart Surgery" podcast to discuss innovations in the field in light of COVID-19.
Editor's note: These responses were lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: How do you see heart care evolving in the next 18 months or so, especially given some of the new technologies available?
Howard Haronian, Vice President and Chief Quality and Innovation Officer of Hartford (Conn.) HealthCare Heart & Vascular Institute: Well, I do see that as we recover from this COVID-19 lockdown, I think we'll be able to engage physicians and hospitals again into more exciting research and innovation where some of those programs have had to take a backseat to the demands of just meeting the clinical challenge of COVID-19 cases. Starting to meet again on a local level, meet again at national meetings, because that's where the informal brainstorming takes place that usually reignites creativity and innovation. My experience in the past two years has been a lot of Zoom meetings and a lot of problem-focused meetings or specialty-specific meetings where presentations are made, etc. But we are lacking that inherent creativity that comes from just meeting people, having time, having a little breather from the pressures of our clinical work. And we really haven't had that with COVID-19. We've all been under stress from staffing shortages, patient overloads and being pulled in many directions. So I think in the next 18 months, what I'd like to see is a return toward that more focus on our own subspecialties and how we can be creative and innovative, how we can move the needle.
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David Singh, MD, electrophysiologist at The Queen's Health Systems in Honolulu: I think one of the things that we learned from COVID-19 was we were forced to change very rapidly, and this is not unique to cardiology. But our entire model of care changed from patients coming in to see us in the office and coming in for procedures under a certain kind of context, and we had to revamp all of that stuff in an extraordinarily short period of time. So who knows what the next 18 months will bring. Hopefully, things will be more stable, but I do think that there will be some shifts. Hopefully, we'll begin to focus more on prevention and understanding really what causes these diseases so they don't end up needing procedures in the long run.
The entire idea of how we take care of patients will change. So rather than a patient being insured and coming to see their doctor, hospitals taking care of really, really sick patients and so forth, I think we're really thinking more in terms of like population health. How do we make a population at large healthier? What kinds of systems and therapies can we have in place to ensure that, on a large scale, that we're making our communities safer and healthier overall? So I think that's really going to be an exciting thing to see. There's a lot of transformation going on now here in Hawaii, around this issue.
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Gul Dadlani, Chief of Pediatric Cardiology at Nemours Children's Hospital in Orlando, Fla.: I think in the next 18 months, when we look at cardiovascular care, I think one of the biggest things is that telemedicine is here to stay. COVID-19 and the quarantines that have occurred with it have really stimulated telehealth in multiple facets throughout medicine and cardiology. At our institution here, we have utilized that not only for initial patient visits to take histories and triage patients, but also for follow-up calls to review labs, to review imaging- related studies and to do remote consults for patients who live farther away from our institution that need those prior to surgery or a heart catheterization or an electrophysiology procedure. So I think as we look at telemedicine, it will be here to stay. I think organizations need to be able to utilize that and continue to leverage that for their patient population.
Click here to download the full episode.