Leaders from four cardiology hospitals that were ranked among the best by U.S. News & World Report shared with Becker's the challenges they are facing and how they plan to address them.
Editor's note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Valentin Fuster, MD, PhD. President of Mount Sinai Fuster Heart Hospital and Physician-in-Chief of the Mount Sinai Hospital (New York City): About 10 years ago, I was very involved in research of disease. I was president of the American Heart Association and the World Heart Federation. I reached the conclusion that we knew less about health than disease. I decided at that point to get the best technology available to understand health.
We have new technology to image the arteries from outside. We have been following people for 20 years and are beginning to understand how the disease develops in a silent fashion. Allowing us to study the risk factors that lead to the disease.
Eduardo Marbán, MD, PhD. Executive Director of the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai (Los Angeles) and the Mark S. Siegel Family Foundation Distinguished Professor: We need more "doctor's doctors," outstanding generalist cardiologists. Recruiting such people, but they don't grow on trees.
Lars Svensson, MD, PhD. Chief of the Heart, Vascular and Thoracic Institute at Cleveland Clinic: One of the challenges we, as well as other healthcare organizations, are facing is that we are receiving less CMS reimbursements and there is an increased volume of patients who are no longer covered by Medicaid.
Jonathan Weinsaft, MD. Chief of Cardiology at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center and Weill Cornell Medicine (New York City): Cardiology is a field with incredible excitement, stemming from new technologies and discoveries — including powerful new insights into the molecular bases of heart failure and myocardial infarction, new predictive algorithms enabled by artificial intelligence to predict such events and an array of new percutaneous tools for treatment.
While these advances provide incredible potential to fundamentally transform the landscape for clinical care of an array of cardiovascular conditions and to dramatically improve outcomes for millions of patients, elucidating how best to incorporate individual technologies into clinical care [can be a challenge].
These incredibly exciting innovations hold the potential to dramatically improve cardiovascular care and outcomes. To address this, NewYork-Presbyterian and our program has prioritized investment in both molecular and translational (clinical) research in these areas, with focus on new research and studies that is patient-centric towards the goal of developing personalized cardiovascular therapies to improve well-being for the communities we serve.