Three leaders from cardiology hospitals ranked among the best by U.S. News & World Report shared with Becker's where they think the industry has made the most progress in the last five years.
Question: Where has the industry made the most progress in the last five years?
Editor's note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
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 continue to get better at minimally invasive approaches to serious heart problems. Meanwhile, the availability of more organs from DCD donors has significantly increased our ability to offer transplants to patients in need.
Lars Svensson, MD, PhD. Chief of the Heart, Vascular and Thoracic Institute at Cleveland Clinic: In heart care, great progress has been made in the development and use of less invasive procedures, such as transcatheter valve procedures, and more advanced life support systems for complex cardiac surgery.
Jonathan Weinsaft, MD. Chief of Cardiology at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center and Weill Cornell Medicine (New York City): The cardiovascular landscape has been dramatically transformed during the past five years — a period during which there have been major innovations in heart failure, valvular heart disease, and cardiovascular prevention.
Progress has included new medical therapies, such as SGLT-2 inhibitors and GLP-1 agonists, percutaneous devices for mitral and tricuspid repair and imaging methods like cardiac CT-based atherosclerotic plaque characterization — all of which have been shown to impact cardiovascular prognosis and outcomes for broad cardiovascular patient populations.
Read about the challenges these leaders are facing here, the changes they want to see here and the best leadership advice they have ever received here.