Hi, this is Eric Prostowski and welcome to another segment of EP on EP. I can't even begin to tell you how excited I am to do this segment with a former trainee and someone I'm extraordinarily proud of with her career, Dr. Jody Hurwitz, who is the president, the new president of the Heart Rhythm Society. Jody, welcome to the show. And congratulations on such an honor. So I guess the most important question for you to handle is what are your plans for the year? What are you going to be doing? Well, thank you, first of all, for being here and thank you for always being there for me. Having you as my mentor has meant so much over the years. My pleasure, for sure. So a couple of things. There's a new strategic plan from 2023 to 2026 that the board just approved. So we're going forward with that. One of my big goals for this year and hopefully going forward is just to really stress communication. I think that we learned last year that... Communication, really? Yeah. No, seriously. We do... HRS has been doing a lot over the years. Sometimes not everybody is quite aware, so I think that's going to be front and center and it's really the groundwork for what the strategic plan is going forward. So there's three pillars that we're working on for the strategic plan. Advocate for EP, drive innovations, and advanced knowledge. And so just a little few comments under each of them. For advocate for EP, perhaps a little bit US-centric, but we're trying to communicate HRS advocacy, and of course make sure that HRS remains the premier society for EP practitioners, and making sure that patients and the larger medical community understand that arrhythmia conditions are best treated by us, electrophysiologists. In terms of drive innovations, having HRS identify gaps in care coordination and help develop research initiatives to continue and help with collaboration with industry, which is incredibly important, and regulatory agencies, again, as we saw this year, to be able to secure sustainable resources for us to be the drivers of scientific discovery, and make sure that HRS scientific meetings and publications are really regarded as the innovative EP sources in the world. In terms of advanced knowledge, that we, HRS, continue to be the trusted authoritative source of knowledge. We deliver continuous content accessible worldwide. That's sort of my goal, but it's not going to happen just in my year. I can tell you that much. Yeah, we're going to come back to that, because I think that's a noble goal that's long in coming, right? Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Set the standards for scientific meetings and documents, and be the preferred organization to deliver EP content, and digital reach is underlying all of this. That's a lot. Well, so it's the strategic plan going forward for the next three years, and year one, year two, year three. We'll see what we can do. I know. I think it all sounds great. I know one of the things that others may not know is that you've been in the practice of practicing EP for many years, as I've been, and that does ... I think that's a really good thing, because you know what the issues are for the practicing electrophysiologists, and are hopefully going to address, and I know you will, make sure you address those. Let's get back a little bit to the education. The meeting's great, but you and I have talked about it a little bit, Jodi. Do you have plans to have things sent to us, like if you want to ... In other words, new advances or updates that we get from other places sometimes, where HRS should be the new storehouse for that? That's a really great idea, and really great starting point. I know that there have been monthly updates through inside HRS updates, and perhaps that would be a really good place to start some of this. HRS communities, which hopefully will be a little bit better used, may be a great source for that as well. I have this dream that the core concepts for EP will be deliverable in some different smaller segments, so that people can learn specific answers to specific questions, maybe more about devices, maybe more about ablations, what's new. That kind of topic and information takes a little while to build up, to be more accessible. You're talking about more acute innovations? Well, it doesn't even have to be innovations. I find very valuable some of these sources where they send you a little blurb on a paper. I'm not trying to plug the New England Journal, believe me, but I was thinking I was getting behind in just general cardiology and medicine, so I signed up for this thing. They have very good people, and you get one a week, and they take something they think maybe you should have seen, and they give you the essence. If you want to go read it, that's fine. I always thought, why can't HRS do that for members? It's even something that some of us would pay a little extra for, because it's impossible to keep up anymore. Absolutely, yes. You know, if you're busy in practice, it's impossible, so I'm going to put my plug in for you to work on that. How's that? I love it. That's great. Those are the positives. Have you thought about the headwinds? Things that may be you looking at that, like, uh-oh, I hope this doesn't happen. Well, if I thought of something, uh-oh, I hope it won't happen. I'm not sure I would mention it, but I think on the horizon, one of the big questions coming up are ablations in the ambulatory surgical care centers, so obviously CMS is looking into this. There's going to be a comment period, I think, starting in July, and we, along with ACC, are looking into the specifics of this safety, which is really paramount, so that's something coming up. ABIM, of course, always rears its ugly head. Don't say MOC, please. Well, no. I said it. Okay. There you go. Yeah, I know, and that's beyond, I don't think some of the members understand that's beyond your control. I mean, something like MOC. Right. I mean, it's just- Well, we can make comments and stuff like that. You can make comments, and you can work with the larger, but it's not something that's directly under HRS's control, unless something's changed, right? Right. And some of the issues with the leads across the tricuspid valve, and some of these tear procedures. Yeah. So that's something else- So you're on your plate. You didn't get into international, and I know you have some thoughts on it, so share those thoughts with us. Yeah, so again, given everything that we've been through from the CMS situation this past year, I think it's very important that people understand that we are an international organization, and that we are including international organizations, and making sure that we hear everybody's peace of mind about everything. There was a wonderful LA HRS, Latin American HRS summit on Thursday, and last year there was an AP- We should stop people talking, because this will be aired later. We're at the National Heart Rhythm Society meetings, just so people know where we're taping. And there was an AP HRS summit last year, and we're looking forward to another summit next year. So we're really listening, and getting involved with lots of different organizations. I wish you the very best this year. I know you're going to do a great job, and I can't thank you enough for being on the show, and I can't thank you enough for our friendship over the years. Thank you very much.

Heart Rhythm Society

strategic plan

communication

electrophysiology advocacy

educational resources