Based on my observations and those of the doctors on the Diagnostic & Interventional Cardiology Editorial Advisory Board, we created the following list of predictions of what will be hot trends to watch in 2012.


Based on my observations and those of the doctors on the Diagnostic & Interventional Cardiology Editorial Advisory Board, we created the following list of predictions of what will be hot trends to watch in 2012.

Manual compression remains the gold standard of care in sealing interventional access site wounds, but there is a trend toward newer technologies that promise to simplify post-operative care for nursing staff, requiring less monitoring time, helping increase patient throughput and maximizing the use of staff time.

The key players in the U.S. defibrillator-monitor market are Physio-Control, Philips and Zoll. These systems offer much more robust capabilities than consumer-grade automatic external defibrillators (AEDs). Today’s defibrillator-monitors offer 12-lead electrocardiograms (ECGs), remote wireless transmission of these waveforms to hospitals ahead of a patient’s arrival, and additional vital signs data. The systems are designed for use by both emergency medical services (EMS) and hospital code-blue teams.

Sudden cardiac arrest and acute myocardial infarction are two of the largest public health problems facing Western medicine. To improve this situation, access to accurate data to measure and benchmark treatments and outcomes is vital. Over the past two decades, Zoll Medical Corp. has built a suite of products for emergency medical service (EMS) and hospitals to address these issues and drive improvements in outcomes. More recently, Zoll’s focus has been on data integration, enabling data from multiple sources to provide a complete picture of patient care in these settings.


With the approval of the Sapien valve in November 2011, transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) technology is expected to revolutionize heart valve replacement with a minimally invasive procedure to replace open-heart surgery. However, it requires a good deal of planning, sizing and anatomical assessment of access routes using computed tomography (CT) scans with manipulation by advanced visualization software.

Recently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the Edwards Sapien transcatheter heart valve for patients with aortic stenosis (AS), who are not suitable for standard aortic valve replacement (AVR). This approval is a landmark event in cardiac medicine and will change the way patients with aortic valve disease are treated.

When the time nears for quarterly submissions to the American College of Cardiology (ACC)-National Cardiovascular Data Registry (NCDR), most hospital cardiology departments around the country are scrambling. Numerous staff must work feverishly to manually collect the necessary information from different patient charts and then validate the accuracy of that data. It’s tedious, expensive and – thanks to information technology – unnecessary.

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