Physicians in fields like cardiology have traditionally looked to clinical practice guidelines to help articulate the best evidence-based care for patients. The rapidly growing movement to value-based care is prompting clinicians—including echocardiographers—to carefully weigh a more focused and integrative approach to delivering consistent, quality medicine: care pathways.

Treating today’s cancer patient no longer means simply targeting the cancer. Given the known cardiotoxicities of some established chemotherapies and the possibility that newer approaches may damage the heart, oncologists, cardiologists and imaging specialists now work together to detect and minimize the risk of treatment-induced heart failure.

The approval of two new Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes acknowledges echocardiographic myocardial strain imaging and myocardial contrast perfusion echocardiography as emerging technologies, often a necessary step before a code is promoted to payable status.

Transcatheter aortic valve replacement offers valuable lessons that can be applied to its mitral valve counterpart, according to imagers on the frontlines for both techniques.

ASE says new data may be a “wake-up call” to recognize the value of echocardiography.  

At the American Society of Echocardiography (ASE) annual scientific sessions, the use of point-of-care echocardiography is among the major topics of discussion. The conference takes place from June 12 to June 16 at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston.

ASE members discuss recent changes to contrast enhanced stress echo.