New this year, ACC.15 will host a Practice Management and Leadership intensive today from 12:15 p.m. to 6 p.m. in room 10. The intensive co-chairs, Michael Valentine, MD, FACC, and Pamela S. Douglas, MD, MACC, have served as co-directors of the ACC’s Cardiovascular Summit for the past four years – an annual gathering focused on the practice of running a well-oiled clinical program and providing today’s cardiologists and members of the cardiovascular care team with the expertise needed to create better patient outcomes through the delivery of high quality, cost-effective care. Valentine and Douglas will deliver a highly condensed version of the Summit at ACC.15, providing attendees with the most important lessons learned.

“We’re excited to bring this programming to ACC.15, where you have a large number of people coming from all walks,” says Valentine. “We’re providing exposure to many of these concepts on a larger basis.”

Tackling issues that are more likely to appear on an Excel spreadsheet than on a patient’s medical chart, Valentine and Douglas will host educational sessions on practice-saving concepts such as operational leadership, stabilizing finances, proper service line management, administrative data and quality parameters, and insight into government health care payment structures and requirements.

“Most of us need both on the job training and didactics to be the best possible leaders,” says Douglas. “Attendees should be able to confidently identify, tackle and improve issues in their practice after leaving our session.”

“I think the College’s members are clamoring more and more each year for member value from the ACC, and this intensive provides true value that they have not seen before,” adds Valentine. “Helping them with practice finance, management, leadership development, and data to improve their quality is something that we’ve all talked about, but this is the opportunity to bring it all together. Members that miss these opportunities are really missing one of the most important reasons to be a member of the ACC – and that’s to deliver better, more effective, efficient and high quality care to patients.”

During the intensive, Ralph G. Brindis, MD, MPH, MACC, will deliver the James T. Dove Lecture on “What Will a ‘Valuable’ Cardiologists Have to do by 2020?”

“Already upon us, the changing health care environment is undergoing the transition from the previous paradigm of fee for service to newer payment models focusing on population health. What is your own value and worth? The answer is not monetary, but what is your value and worth to your patients, your peers, your hospital system, the payers and the government,” says Brindis. “Clinicians need to know their personal NCDR registry data along with other relevant cardiovascular performance measures and metrics appreciating the certainty of their increasing accountability for patient and peer satisfaction, efficiency, cost-savings and demonstration of value along with the increasing reality of transparency and public reporting of our performance.”

Ralph G. Brindis, MD, MPH, MACC, delivering the James T. Dove Lecture.

Keywords: ACC Annual Scientific Session, Columbidae, Cost Savings, Delivery of Health Care, Disease Management, Fee-for-Service Plans, Government, Inservice Training, Leadership, Registries

< Back to Listings