A new document from the American Society of Echocardiography (ASE) provides detailed guidance for clinicians on how to use echocardiography to see the full picture of the condition of patients with hypertension. The paper, Recommendations on the Use of Echocardiography in Adult Hypertension: A Report from the European Association of Cardiovascular Imaging (EACVI) and the American Society of Echocardiography (ASE) is a joint project between ASE and the European Association of Cardiovascular Imaging (EACVI) and will appear in the July issue of the Journal of the American Society of Echocardiography (JASE).

Key to ongoing U.S. healthcare reform are efforts to reduce costs by eliminating unnecessary medical procedures and using information technology (IT) to justify costs that are incurred to make providers more accountable. Key medical societies in each subspecialty will be responsible for what standards of care should be set and what guidelines should be followed. In the cath lab, fractional flow reserve (FFR) is already viewed as the gold standard for determining the hemodynamic impact of coronary lesions, acting as a gatekeeper to whether a patient is stented or receives medical therapy alone. For this reason, FFR is already being predicted as the measurement of record that will be required in documentation for stent reimbursement in the future.