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Pulse of PACES (POP) #1
Summer Newsletter
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Hello!
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The Latin word communicare (from where the word communication is born) means “to make common” – i.e. make knowledge common. The stem is the same as that used in the word community. This makes sense as in many ways, communication is the foundation of community. With this, we welcome you to the re-invigorated PACES Newsletter, the Pulse of PACES or “POP 1”. Our hope is that we can communicate better, but not as a goal itself, but rather as a means to build community.
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Message from the President
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Over the past several months, a large amount of work has gone into strategic planning for PACES as we move into the future. The purpose of this work has been to align the passion and talent we have within our membership with the goals and missions of the group. The executive committee continues to refine our trajectory with the data collected. As always, we welcome your perspective and input.
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On recent survey, 56% of PACES members felt there was not enough communication. Going forward, we anticipate regular brief newsletters with a very straightforward purpose: We want you to be fully apprised of the activity of the group and we want to encourage your involvement wherever possible.
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Thank you for all your hard work and dedication!
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Upcoming Events
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8th World Congress of Pediatric Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery
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Washington D.C. (Aug 27-Sept 1)
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PediRhythm pre-conference at World Congress
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Children’s Heartbeat Session 34 (Sep 29, 10 am EST)
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Seattle, WA (Sept 21-Sept 23)
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Awards & Accolades
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There were several awards announced at the recent PACES business meeting, including young investigator awards, research awards, service awards, and Lifetime Achievement awards. Congratulations to all the recent award recipients! Inspirational to say the least.
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PACES Lifetime Achievement Award – Larry A. Rhodes, MD
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PACES Lifetime Achievement Award – Victoria L. Vetter, MD
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Paul C. Gillette PACES Research Grant – Minu-Tshyeto K. Bidzimou
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PACES Outstanding Service Award – Shashank P. Behere, MD
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SADS Basic Science YIA – David Chiang MD, PhD
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SADS Clinical/Translational YIA – Megan Lancaster MD, PhD
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Research Update
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We welcome the newest members to the research committee, Drs. Jeremy Moore and Iqbal El-Assaad. Coming off our PACES business meeting, our committee presented the Paul Gillette Award to Minu-Tshyeto Bizimou from Duke, mentored by Andrew Landstrom. We also presented the SADS Young Investigator Awards to David Chiang (basic science) and his mentor Calum MacRae, and Megan Lancaster (clinical) and her mentor Dan Roden. The Heart Rhythm Society sponsored The Beat Webinar Series, which featured our very own PACES members, Prince Kannankeril, Susan Etheridge and Sabrina Tsao, on a discussion of challenging channelopathy cases. This Beat Session was recorded live in New Orleans. Finally, PACES research will be featured in an upcoming episode of The Lead Podcast, another HRS sponsored endeavor and PACES partnership. Please find all PACES approved research protocols on our website: https://pacesep.org/research-publications/research/
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Advocacy Update
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This past year has been trying in many ways. PACES has been hard at work advocating for our community. A few highlights below:
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PACES was contacted by the Amosov National Institute of CV Surgery in Ukraine as they were running out of CryoCatheters for pediatric ablations and were unable to receive supplies do to war related barriers. PACES organized an initiative with Medtronic and on March 27, twenty-four new Freezor Family catheters were delivered to the pediatric ablation center successfully. Shout out to Medtronic for donating the catheters in this humanitarian effort.
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The PACES Executive Committee wrote two letters to CMS advocating against the proposed 2023 CMS reduction in Medicare and Medicaid Physician fee schedule for cardiac EP procedures (CMS-1770-P). In particular, focus was drawn to the multitude of negative downstream impacts this could have in our vulnerable patient population (children and patients with CHD). We will continue to advocate for our community in this regards.
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Membership Update
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We have a newly formed Membership Committee, to help with issues related to membership, including recruitment and retention as well as ensuring that we are delivering adequate value to our members. If you are interested in joining, please reach out to Gaurav Arora at gaurav.arora@chp.edu. We would anticipate intermittent meetings, perhaps monthly at first but likely quarterly at steady state.
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Finance Update
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Greetings! We have paid off all of our bills from our Annual Meeting at HRS2023 in NOLA. Our current accounts are in good standing and are as follows:
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Savings Account: $117,006.24
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Checking Account: $15,543.80
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Total Available Balance: $132,550
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Please be aware that we will be revamping the Finance Committee—so thank you to those of you who have responded to emails. Please be on the lookout for emails to come. In addition, we are working on some potential new opportunities for PACES to work with industry to advance the needs of the pediatric and congenital EP community. If you have any interest in this, please email me (jennifersilva@wustl.edu).
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Administrative Update
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I am thrilled to be joining the PACES executive team as the newest member, taking over from President Kim as VP of administration. The role of VP of administration is broad, covering issues of membership, website, document management, advocacy and more. Our newest endeavor will be to build our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committee, which will support our expansion of our mission statement to include these critical principles. I welcome input and if anyone would like to be involved in this new project, please reach out!
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QI Update
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The QI Committee is currently working on several initiatives. Importantly, the NCDR has informed us that they will be launching IMPACT v.3 in 2024. This is our first opportunity to revise since we started submitting data in 2015. We are restructuring many of the fields with a goal of making the next version more useful. It’s not too late to provide feedback and we welcome anyone who is interested. In addition, NCDR understands that the current quarterly reports are not particularly helpful and is launching a new dashboard to improve data presentation. Personally, we think this is a huge improvement. The IMPACT staff has been happy to demo the new dashboard to anyone interested. Finally, we continue to make progress on our PACES Remote Monitoring QI project, spear-headed by Aarti Dalal and Brad Clark, which has resulted in abstract presentations and a published review of the project in Heart Rhythm. We invite anyone who would like to join the Remote Monitoring QI project or contribute to developing our next QI project. If you’d like to participate in any of these initiatives, contact Doug Mah (Douglas.Mah@CARDIO.CHBOSTON.ORG) or Ronn Tanel (ronn.tanel@ucsf.edu).
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FDA Update
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The FDA/PACES taskforce is continuing on its mission to improve pediatric labeling for electrophysiology devices. We continue to meet regularly with members of industry interested in either pediatric device development or labeling opportunities. The taskforce is presently working with Boston Scientific to explore the possibility of pediatric labeling for the S-ICD. To aid in that endeavor, please be on the lookout for a 10 min survey from us regarding your practice around this device. We would appreciate your input!
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International Update
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2021 and 2022 have been difficult achieving international engagement due to travel restrictions. With the help of the website team, the international discussion forum https://pacesep.org/discussion-board/international-discussion-forum/ was established. This is open for all members plus interested physicians can join for a nominal fee of $10 (just for forum access). It would be great if you can spread this further.
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The 2023 highlight so far was the first post covid meeting in New Orleans with return of the international travel grant. We had very competitive applications and the winner Amna Qureshi from Lahore gave an insightful presentation about the issues of EP in Pakistan (see photo), and I am looking forward for next year’s applications.
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For this year I hope, many international members will join the new and “old” Subcommittees in PACES to make PACES a truly international community for EP.
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Get to know the members
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Get to know PACES (Coming Soon)
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Member highlights and “get to know your colleagues” section coming soon.
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Thank You!
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