1. Restructuring Structural Heart Disease Practice During the COVID-19 Pandemic
- Author
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Allan Schwartz, Isaac George, Angelo B. Biviano, Torsten Vahl, Susheel Kodali, Martin B. Leon, Christine J. Chung, Lisa Hathaway, Rebecca T. Hahn, Elaine Wan, Omar K. Khalique, LeRoy E. Rabbani, Amisha Patel, Ajay J. Kirtane, Nadira Hamid, Mariusz Wolbinski, Carolina Pinheiro Rezende, Nir Uriel, Emad Hakemi, Tamim Nazif, James Doolittle, Vivian Ng, Russell Brandwein, Mark Lebehn, and Vinayak Bapat
- Subjects
medicine.medical_specialty ,Heart disease ,Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) ,business.industry ,Restructuring ,MEDLINE ,030204 cardiovascular system & hematology ,medicine.disease ,Comorbidity ,03 medical and health sciences ,0302 clinical medicine ,Infectious disease (medical specialty) ,Health care ,Pandemic ,medicine ,030212 general & internal medicine ,Cardiology and Cardiovascular Medicine ,business ,Intensive care medicine - Abstract
Patients with structural heart disease are at increased risk of adverse outcomes from the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) due to advanced age and comorbidity. In the midst of a global pandemic of a novel infectious disease, reality-based considerations comprise an important starting point for formulating clinical management pathways. The aims of these "crisis-driven" recommendations are: 1) to ensure appropriate and timely treatment of structural heart disease patients; 2) to minimize the risk of COVID-19 exposure to patients and health care workers; and 3) to limit resource utilization under conditions of constraint. Although the degree of disruption to usual practice will vary across the United States and elsewhere, we hope that early experiences from a heart team operating in the current global epicenter of COVID-19 may prove useful for others adapting their practice in advance of local surges of COVID-19.
- Published
- 2020
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