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PACES Summer Newsletter

By admin | July 28, 2020 | Comments Off on PACES Summer Newsletter

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dear PACES members,

I hope that everyone is having a most enjoyable summer. Forgive me for the delay in getting this newsletter out to everyone. For starters, I want to personally thank Shu Sanatani for all of his incredible hard work and dedication over the last year. I also want to thank Brynn-Dechert Crooks, Sabrina Tsao, and Jan Till for putting on a unique PACES pre-conference that truly fostered many collaborative and open discussions along the topics of screening and sudden cardiac death prevention. Lastly, a heartfelt congratulation should once again be given to John Kugler as the recipient of the PACES Lifetime Achievement Award.

For those of you who have not visited the website recently I would encourage you to do so. In the section “About the Society” Ian Law and Carolyn Dick have put together a collection of excellent talks by Woody Benson, Ed Walsh, George Van Hare and Mac Dick regarding the history of PACES.


The pediatric electrophysiologists from around the world had some excellent sessions at the 7th World Congress of Pediatric Cardiology and Cardiothoracic Surgery in Barcelona in July including a joint session with AEPC that was highly attended. From an international perspective, PACES will begin running a pilot project on 2nd opinion case reviews which will be chaired by Maria Cecila Gonzlaez and Ulrich Krause. I also want to personally thank Thomas Kriebel, Thomas Paul, and Laszlo Kornyei for their continued efforts to foster and support joint pediatric EP academic relations between Europe and North America and Jun Yoshimoto for his efforts bridging Asia and North America.

The PACES Executive Committee has been quite active since HRS and I hope you find this newsletter provides some updates. If you have suggestions for what else you would like to see in the newsletter please reach out to me.

I hope everyone enjoys the rest of summer (and winter south of the equator).

Best regards,

Mitchell Cohen MD FACC FHRS
President PACES
mitchcohenmd@gmail.com

RESEARCH UPDATE

Greetings from the PACES Research Committee (PRC)! The PRC is thrilled to add several new members this year. Jonathan Kaltman, Paul Khairy, Bhavya Trivedi, Anne Dubin, Lindsay Malloy, Christopher Janson, Robert Hamilton, Jeremy Moore, Andras Bratincsak, will join existing members Woody Benson, Greg Webster, Martin LaPage, Mark Levin, Naomi Kertesz and Peter Aziz. In addition we would like to extend a special welcome to our international colleagues Ulrich Krause (Germany) and Georgia Brugada (Spain). We are looking forward to another productive year. Please feel free to email me for any PACES Research related questions shahm@email.chop.edu

Best wishes

Maully Shah

VP, PACES Research

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ADVOCACY UPDATE

From the advocacy standpoint we have ambitious goals for the upcoming year. Our first goal is to invite electrophysiologists around the globe to join PACES . We have been reaching out to friends and contacts from all over. We request the membership to reach out us (send emails to balajis@ohsu.edu) if they have specific persons that they think we should reach out to.
We have also sent out a goal that PACES will be the go-to organization for all matters related to rhythm issues in children and patients with congenital heart disease. To this end we are reaching out organization such as a AP, ACC, AHA, AEPC, etc. More to come on this topic in the upcoming months.

Best wishes

Seshandri Balaji

VP, Advocacy & Administration

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FINANCE UPDATE

PACES is in a strong financial position which allows us to fulfill our mission to advocate for pediatric and adult congenital patients with arrhythmias. Thanks to all members for their active participation and for paying their dues on time. We will begin renewals for 2018 in October. PACES is committed to growing our international membership and the Finance Committee will continue to provide discounts to members from economically disadvantaged countries. This fall applications will be available for individuals from economically challenged countries to apply for a travel grant to HRS-Boston. PACES plans to award two such grants. If you know of anyone who wishes to join, now is a great opportunity. Thanks to the Patrick Joyce Fund who held their annual run to help benefit PACES on July 29. Thanks also to the Paul Gillette fund for their continued support of PACES research.

Thanks for your continuing support

Bryan Cannon, MD

VP of Finance

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ALLIED PROFESSIONAL UPDATE

As summer comes to an end, the AP group continues to work hard producing and planning for the next year!

The AP Nursing Research committee, chaired by the one and only Vicki Ziegler, PhD, RN, is ready to recruit members! The purpose of the committee is to encourage and stimulate projects related to AP clinical practices and interests, and to provide a platform for scholarly interaction. We are looking for 10-15 members to join the committee. The only requirement is a desire to learn about and participate in the research process! One of our major goals is to design and implement a multi-center AP research study through PACES. Mentoring and teamwork will be provided!

We continue to develop new patient/parent education printed documents for the PACES website. We are also beginning to develop new technology formats such as audio-enhanced power point presentations for patient education on the website. A brief user-focused survey for feedback from the site users (patient/parent/health care providers) on what is helpful and what could be improved with this portion of the website is now live! The survey be found at https://pacesep.org/patient-resources, and we are already getting responses.

The Document-Sharing section on the member-only portal of the website is a great resource for AP members to share documents which have been useful to them in their clinical practice. We will suggest via email a monthly topic for documents to share, but feel free to contribute any documents that you’d like at any time! Please send documents to me at vfreeden@cnmc.org and I’ll get them on the website.

Looking forward to a great upcoming year! If you would like to get involved with PACES, or if you have any questions or suggestions, please contact me at vfreeden@cnmc.org.

All the best,

Vicki Freedenberg, PhD, RN

PACES AP Representative

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EDUCATION COMMITTEE UPDATE

The Education Committee’s mission is to organize PACES-related educational activities while fostering collaboration amongst PACES members in educational endeavors. The committee has grown in its inaugural year to include: Beth Jarosz, Anica Bulic, William Goodyer, Anne Greene, Akash Patel, Eric Silver, Kara Motonaga, Shaun Mohan, Santiago Valdes, Christopher Johnsrude, David Gamboa, Peter Fishbach, David Fairbrother, Nick Von Bergen, Louis James Rigos and, Mark Shwayder, and Sara Cherney.

Our current initiatives include:

  • Developing PACES CASES, an interactive, case-based teaching module for pediatric cardiology fellows
  • Developing an online pediatric ECG teaching module for cardiology trainees
  • Organizing and distributing PJRT (Publication EP Journal Review by Trainees), a quarterly succinct report of recent PACES-related journal articles by EP fellows
  • Analysis of the workforce and training survey that was distributed and completed in May 2017.
    Organizing and helping to plan the pre-HRS PACES symposium (more to come)

We are excited to be working on the above activities and are always looking to explore novel educational endeavors. If anyone has any questions/ideas for the committee or is interested in joining the committee, please contact either of us via email.

Sincerely,

Andy Blaufox

Co-Chair
Ablaufox@Northwell.edu

Scott Ceresnak

Co-Chair
ceresnak@stanford.edu

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PACES QA/QI Committee Update

The PACES QA/QI committee is underway. We have a busy agenda starting setting up the basic tools we need to run the committee. In addition to setting up a virtual meeting space where we can communicate with each other and store documents, we are collating a contact list for all of the participants in the IMPACT registry, creating a dashboard to track PACES membership involvement in QA/QI activities, and creating a path for PACES members to communicate feedback about QA/QI related activities. Following these start-up activities we will focus on helping ongoing issues with EP integration into IMPACT registry. With our feedback pipeline in place, we will use this information to help guide the next version of the EP dataset in the IMPACT registry.

Best regards,

Steve Seslar, MD

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UPCOMING MEETINGS

SADS – September 22, 2107

Preventing Sudden Cardiac Death

(Sheraton Toronto Airport Hotel & Conference Center) –please register at the SADS Website for more information (www.SADS.org)

Mayo Clinic – October 6-7

Genetics of Heart & Vascular Disease

(Francis Marion Hotel Charleston South Carolina) – please register at https://cveducation.mayo.edu/

Coming Soon to a PACES Website Nearby:

  • Case Presentations
  • EKG Learning Repository
  • Enrollment in CAP-IT CIED QI Registry

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