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Thomas Draper, Vice President at Wellstar Center for Cardiovascular Care

Thomas Draper is the Vice President of cardiovascular care at Wellstar Center. With decade's worth of experience in the cardiovascular space, he is currently recognized as a leading innovator working to transform and grow clinical program development with top physician recruitment and retention, financial management, resource optimization, and more. Moreover, his accomplishments are crowned with numerous publications and presentations, making him a national expert in the cardiovascular space. At Wellstar Center, his responsibilities fences operations to strategies. He looks after planning programs and operations for optimum patient care by aligning with the organization's strategies.

Could you walk us through some of the ongoing trends in the cardiovascular space?

Developments were already taking place in the cardiovascular space, but the emergence of COVID-19 and its ramifications have accelerated them. From the past 20-24 months, we have started to witness a massive drive of providing patient care in an out-patient setting. For example, due to hospital-bed unavailability during COVID-19, trends like same-day catheterizations to same-day delivery became the inevitable option for providing cardiovascular services. Moreover, healthcare facilities like ambulatory surgery centers (ASC) were initiated, enabling patients to receive same-day surgery centers in a relatively low-cost setting. Such trends empowered healthcare organizations too, and they were able to bring in more complex cases within the hospital's facilities that were once delayed because of the occupied beds.

Mentioned so, these out-patient services have also created some economic concerns for several organizations. As several revenue-generating operations were shifted to a lower-cost and lower-reimbursement setting, earnings for hospitals received a sudden downgrade.

Virtual-care service is another aspect that was boosted during the pandemic by making some rudimentary changes in traditional healthcare regulations. And, even after the pandemic, we are trying to grow it vigorously so that care providence to a bigger population can be attained seamlessly. In near future, we aim to provide home-care services for hypertension control, lipid control, remote monitoring for electrophysiology, and cardiovascular medication management. 

In cardiovascular ecosystem, the integration of technology and medicine is a much-awaited trend that has started to revolutionize daily operations of the space. As a five-year strategy, AI and natural language processing are being induced to identify a larger section of patients with atrial fibrillation, hypertension, valve diseases, and several others who couldn't be earlier detected or treated.

In light of the recent market changes, what will be your advice to your peers?

Any medical personnel should step out of the quagmires of their own operations and start connecting with their medical peers. They must build networks with colleagues across the country to have an alternative look at the concurrent issues and explore other ways to deal with them. Furthermore, they must seek collaborations with different industry partners like digital health professionals to explore the potentials of the digital wave in the cardiovascular space.

What will be your strategies for the future?

Within the next year and a half, I am looking forward to optimizing Electronic Health Records (EHRs) to identify under-managed patients. During the pandemic, ample patients stopped reaching out to medical facilities, as they feared the spread of COVID-19 infection. Consequently, their cardiovascular complications have elaborated and they will require proper medical attention soon.

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