Quality Improvement

Dr. Sara J. Pereira shares her experience in Birmingham, Alabama, describing how the pandemic has created a renewed role for telemedicine and the reality of disease progression in patients whose care has been delayed.

Dr. Vinod H. Thourani describes how the coronavirus pandemic is affecting cardiothoracic surgeons and their patients and how the specialty is uniquely equipped to handle the high-intensity work of actively managing COVID-19 patients.

Dr. T. Sloane Guy describes how the coronavirus pandemic is affecting hospitals and patients in the US and what it means for the cardiothoracic surgery specialty.

Dr. Alan D. L. Sihoe offers an international perspective on COVID-19 and shares his personal experience and thoughts on how the coronavirus pandemic has affected Hong Kong and what it means for the rest of the world. 

Dr. Douglas E. Wood describes the findings from the NELSON trial and what they mean for policy and program development for lung cancer early detection through CT screening.

The article "Surgical Volume Matters When It Comes to Repair of Primary MR" highlights a presentation from Dr. Vinay Badhwar at TCT 2019 that showed the volume of mitral valve repair or replacement at both the hospital and surgeon levels was inversely related to the success of the mitral valve repair rate. Dr. James R. Edgerton describes the article, what it means for the cardiothoracic surgery specialty, and his view on the topic of a volume-outcome relationship in mitral valve surgery.

Surgeons with a higher number of unprofessional behavior reports also had a significant increase in their patients' 30-day operative complication rates.