SCAI Session to Address Disruptive Technologies in Interventional Cardiology

March 30, 2015—The Society for Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions (SCAI) announced that presentations on how disruptive technologies spurred by increasing costs and variability of health care will change interventional cardiology will be addressed during the opening session of the SCAI 2015 scientific sessions, which will be held in San Diego, California, on May 6–9. 

The opening session on “State-of-the-Art Technologies” will take place Wednesday, May 6, at 1 PM and feature Peter Fitzgerald, MD, and Christian Assad-Kottner, MD, who will encourage physicians to embrace technological advances. Dr. Fitzgerald is with Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and Dr. Assad-Kottner is with the Fogarty Institute for Innovation and El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, California.

In the SCAI press release, Dr. Fitzgerald commented, “Variability in care, health system consolidation, and increasing financial pressures are driving an increasing need for standardization. At the same time, innovative companies like Apple, Google, and Samsung are entering health care. This convergence will drive greater change in how interventional cardiologists provide care, and it’s something we can all embrace.”

In his presentation, Dr. Fitzgerald will discuss examples of how emerging technologies will lead to better care. He continued, “Incredible point-of-care diagnostics are available today. Soon we’ll be able to model the size and length of stent needed before we get to the cath lab. And we’ll be able to better assess the patient’s outcomes—that’s exciting because we can provide even better care, more efficiently and possibly for more patients.”

Dr. Assad-Kottner added, “We have the ability to take our medical knowledge and use new technologies to creatively solve the problems we face today.” He said interventional cardiologists will also need to understand and use new exponential technologies, which are types of technologies that rapidly evolve even as they fundamentally change medicine. Examples include three-dimensional printing, robotics, genomics, sensors, and artificial intelligence. He stated that physicians are just beginning to understand and evaluate how these and other technologies can affect patient care. 

Dr. Fitzgerald noted that young physicians are beginning not only to embrace these changes but also to demand them. As medical schools broaden their focus to include business, health care economics, and information technology, young physicians are entering the field better prepared for the changes that are ahead.

“The students are demanding the change. Our 30-year-olds are emerging from medical schools with so much more in their armamentarium. Still, there’s a lot of wisdom experienced interventional cardiologists can share to improve these new systems. We all need to get involved because it’s an exciting time for the field of interventional cardiology,” concluded Dr. Fitzgerald in the SCAI announcement.