Credit: Original article published here.
CardioNerds correspondents Drs. Shiva Patiolla and Jeff Wang are covering The Houston Shock Symposium 2023. They are joined by the founder and director of the Houston Shock Symposium, Dr. Marwan Jumean, and Dr. Anju Bhardwaj, who currently serves as an assistant professor of medicine in the section of cardiology at the McGovern Medical School. The group discusses the theme of this year’s symposium, which is Breaking Boundaries, and will focus on the five areas of cardiogenic shock management, which are: Cardiac ICU, Cath Lab, Medical ICU, Operating Room, and Surgical ICU. See what these thought leaders had to say!
Dr. Shiva Patiolla: Hello, everyone and thank you for joining us today. I am Shiva Patiolla. I’m a cardiology fellow at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, Texas, and a CardioNerds FIT Trialist.
Dr. Jeff Wang: All right. Hi, everyone. My name is Jeff Wang, and I am a cardiology fellow at Emory University and a CardioNerds FIT Trialist as well. And we are really excited to serve as CardioNerds Conference Scholars for the 2023 Houston Shock Symposium with mentorship from Dr. Andrew Higgins.
Dr. Shiva Patiolla: It is our great pleasure to be joined by the founder and director of the Houston Shock Symposium, Dr. Marwan Jumean. He is an interventional heart failure cardiologist and associate professor at UTHealth McGovern Medical School here in Houston, Texas. During his training, he spent time at the University of Jordan, the Mayo Clinic and Tufts Medical Center. He’s a leader in the field of cardiogenic shock and he’s on the forefront of the integration of interventional and heart failure Cardiology. Welcome, Dr. Jumean.
Dr. Marwan Jumean: Thank you very much for the introduction.
Dr. Jeff Wang: And then Dr. Anju Bhardwaj, who currently serves as an assistant professor of medicine in the section of cardiology at the McGovern Medical School. She completed medical school at the Government Medical College in India. She then completed internal medicine at St. Joseph’s University, and then she has completed cardiology and heart failure fellowships at Harvard Medical School, Mass General, Case Western, and Baylor College of Medicine. Welcome to you, Dr. Bhardwaj.
Dr. Anju Bhardwaj: Thank you, Jeff and Shiva. Thank you. Welcome to the Houston Shock Symposium.
Dr. Shiva Patiolla: So, Dr. Bhardwaj, I wanted to start with the theme of this year’s symposium, which is Breaking Barriers and the Five Areas of Shock Management. What does this mean to you and how does this symposium aim to help achieve this objective?
Dr. Anju Bhardwaj: Thank you, Shiva. And as Marwan has mentioned in his message, with this year’s theme of Breaking Boundaries, we here at Houston Shock is expanding its focus to include shock management in five settings. That is the cath lab, cardiac ICU, medical ICU, surgical ICU and the OR. I think we’ve made a point already that we need a multidisciplinary team for management of shock, but management of shock cannot be restricted into one unit, cath lab or OR for that matter.
So, in this symposium, what we have is different sessions dedicated to shock in all these settings, various phenotypes of shock and their hemodynamic variations. Experts from their respective fields will be sharing their expertise on various provocative issues and clinical issues and topics. And we have some very interesting intellectually stimulating debates as well.
So, our major goal is to help our various attendees whether it’s physicians or fellows-in-training to identify shock, characterize patients presented with shock, and highlight this right therapy for right patient so we can just move the needle and improve some outcomes in shock. Thank you.
Dr. Jeff Wang: Awesome. So, this question is for Dr. Jumean. So, this is the fifth symposium. First off, congrats to you and the success on getting the conference to this point. So as the founder and director of the Houston Shock Symposium, my questions are how did you come up with the inspiration for this symposium and what was the biggest challenge in getting it off the ground five years ago?
Dr. Marwan Jumean: So, if you look at the data, we realize that the mortality for patients presenting in shock, it approaches 50%. This is extremely unacceptable. And in a world that what we’re doing is to improve quality of life and improve survival, this is highly unacceptable. And moving from Boston where I trained, coming here to Houston and seeing a lot of sick patients in the ICU and looking at the different modalities of therapies and what we’re doing, we really realized that number one, as Anju said that we truly have to instill that multidisciplinary approach to patient care to improve outcomes.
And that’s where it started. With guidance from our co-chairs of the symposium, we started this with an idea and the idea revolves around improving quality of care, improving mortality and outcomes. And in a world where there is a lot of data overload, trying to synthesize that data as a provider at the bedside and what’s good and what’s not good and how is this applicable to my patient becomes challenging at times.
So, this is the best forum where you can have leaders in respective fields from all over the US and outside the US to come together and synthesize that data in a manner that’s going to help us improve that outcome and that goal. And that’s the basis of why the symposium is growing every year.
Dr. Jeff Wang: Great. And then what was the biggest challenge in getting this conference off the ground five years ago?
Dr. Marwan Jumean: There are a lot of challenges. There are a lot of challenges, but challenges are good because that will motivate you to get better and push harder from grand recognition, from instilling the fact that this is an important topic, from getting experts in the field saying this is really important.
There are a lot of conferences out there, why is this different? From getting the funding, because we do believe that education should be free because at the end of the day, it impacts patient care and getting our sponsors and partners from industry to help support this and to grow it. And that’s what we’ve done and overcome most of the challenges that we face.
Dr. Jeff Wang: Fantastic, thank you.
Dr. Shiva Patiolla: And now back to Dr. Bhardwaj, there’s really an all-star roster of faculty here from across the nation and even across the globe. Can you discuss the potential impact of this intellectual community and how attendees like me and Jeff can really maximize our experience at this conference?
Dr. Anju Bhardwaj: Absolutely. So, the best part of this conference is just to be in the company of such thought leaders. We are discussing cutting edge science. We can learn from the research, even their clinical experience specifically in shock where clinical experience is the key. I strongly encourage everyone to attend all these sessions. Each session and talk is extremely high yield. All these lectures will later be uploaded on the website as well.
Then there’s a teach course. Nothing is complete without a teaching course by Dr. Dan Burkhoff. I think that is very insightful and I would strongly recommend all the attendees to attend that, specifically fellows-in-training. There’ll be a skills lab also that will offer hands-on training in all aspects of MCS devices, surgery, medicine from interventional cardiology standpoint.
And I would totally also recommend within the case presentations as the selected cases are very cutting edge, highly innovative. And all of them have involved out of the box strategies. And this year, Marwan is launching a publication’s lounge where there’ll be direct access to meet and talk with journal editors of all the major journals, so where we can discuss various nuances of [inaudible 00:07:12] publishing and even like getting involved for fellows or early careers.
So, I will be moderating that session with my brilliant colleague, Dr. Maria Patarroyo. So, I would recommend all of you guys to please submit your questions at houstonshock@uth.tmc.edu. Okay? Thank you.
Dr. Jeff Wang: Great. And then Dr. Jumean, our last question. What session are you looking forward to the most this year?
Dr. Marwan Jumean: I mean, the topics really, we select these topics from the inception are based on stuff that we encounter at the bedside, taking care of patients. And so, they’re really all high yield sessions. I think the theme was to minimize the presentation time and focus more on the discussion time. So, a lot of people who look as coming here only for seven minutes, well, it’s not about the seven minutes. It’s about what happens after those seven minutes of presentation with a multidisciplinary approach of discussion.
But going back to your question, I look forward to all of it, but I learned the most from looking at cases. And we’ve had a tremendous submission of cases. And right now, we moved on to not just have oral cases, but also poster presentations and try and maximize the approach of how people manage patients at the bedside and how we can learn from each other to push the field forward.
And I want to add to it is that everyone who’s presenting at the symposium and presenting a case or a topic, those will be also published in our new journal, the Journal of Shock and Hemodynamics. It’s a new journal for the Proceedings of the Shock Symposium, and that’s also kind of a written platform, not just a visual platform on the website for people to go back and reference some of the stuff that is being done.
Dr. Jeff Wang: Perfect. Thank you Dr. Bhardwaj and Dr. Jumean for your time today. And then for our audience, be sure to follow the CardioNerds Conference Scholars to keep up with key takeaways from your favorite conferences. Thank you very much.
