The Society of Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions (SCAI) will kick off its 2013 scientific sessions May 8 in Orlando, Fla., with a new feature: an opening session with a keynote address designed to set the tone of the meeting.
The opening session is one of several additions to the program, which offers five standalone tracks for specialists, a town hall session, three lectures, late-breaking clinical trials, structured mini-symposia, oral abstract and poster abstract presentations, brown-bag lunches and more.
This year a quality improvement track has been added to the lineup, joining tracks for coronary interventions, peripheral interventions, structural heart disease and congenital heart disease. The quality improvement track addresses topics such as regulatory policies, quality metrics, payment reform, integrated and patient-centered care, appropriate use criteria, ethics and peer review.
“The landscape is changing around us and we want to stay ahead of the curve,” said Kenneth Rosenfield, MD, program co-chair and section head of vascular medicine and intervention at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Morton J. Kern, MD, chief of cardiology at Long Beach Veterans Administration Medical Center in Long Beach, Calif., also serves as co-chair of the 2013 meeting.
Reed V. Tuckson, MD, will present “Key Challenges and Opportunities for Quality and Cost-effective Health and Medical Care Delivery Today.” As former executive vice president and chief of medical affairs at United HealthGroup, he oversaw business units to improve quality and efficiency of care of more than 70 million people.
Rosenfield said Tuckson likely will challenge the audience to set and meet high standards. “He’s a fiery guy,” he said. “He says [physicians] need to be accountable, think about patients and police themselves.”
Robert “Chip” Hance, entrepreneur-in-residence at the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health and a former president at Abbott Vascular, will speak at a town hall session about an initiative that unites innovators with the agency. His talk, “A Call to Action: Improving the U.S. Cardio Device Clinical Research Ecosystem,” is scheduled for May 10.
Lectures include:
- “Top 10 Observations from 35 years on Invasive Cardiology Practice,” by George W. Vetrovec, MD, director of the adult cardiac catheterization lab at the Virginia Commonwealth University Pauley Heart Center (May 9);
- “Congenital Interventional Training: Past, Present and Future,” by Frank F. Ing, MD, associate chief of cardiology and director of the cardiac catheterization lab at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles (May 9); and
- “Impact of the U.S. Regulatory Process on Interventional Device innovation,” by Jeffrey J. Popma, MD, director of innovations in interventional cardiology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston (May 10).
SCAI 2013 will run through May 11. For a complete program, click here.