As risk-sharing agreements become more common, hospitals and physicians are focusing on teamwork and attention to metrics.  

With physicians and administrators ever more focused on high-quality medicine and the financial bottom line, what trends and strategies are shaping the future of the cardiovascular service line? Let’s take a look at the future forecast through the expert eyes of Brian Contos, an executive director of The Advisory Board Company. Is your program poised to take advantage of changing market dynamics such as outpatient care, reimbursement and payment policies? And what about implantables, MACRA patient-focused care and interventional procedures like Protected PCI?

It’s well-established that cholesterol-lowering PCSK9 inhibitors (PCSK9i) are a pricey addition to any heart patient’s medication regimen, climbing to more than $14,000 per year at retail value and $5,000 in out-of-pocket costs—but they are effective.

Ask cardiologists to name the big advances of the past decade, and many point to transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) and other breakthroughs that are allowing cardiologists to treat structural heart disease with minimally invasive procedures. Looking ahead, some believe that even bigger, broader changes are coming.

Medical device company Medtronic was already projecting a $250 million financial hit due to Hurricane Maria before wildfires in northern California forced it to shut down four facilities in Santa Rosa on Oct. 9. A Medtronic spokesperson said the approximately 840 employees who live in the area have all reported being safe, and the company plans to reopen three of the four plants next week.

In the past 10 years, Medicare has spent more than $1.5 billion in replacing seven types of defective heart devices, according to the HHS Office of the Inspector General. The same report said patients dished out $140 million in out-of-pocket costs.

Hundreds of thousands of children across the U.K. are learning CPR this week in an effort to combat the country’s “stubbornly low” rates of survival for public cardiac arrests.

Noninferiority trials have dramatically increased in number as researchers try to prove new medical devices and drugs are as safe and effective as established therapies. However, the way these studies are designed and interpreted could use a revamp, a pair of reviewers wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine.