Welcome. My name is Jerry Blackwell. I'm the President and CEO of MedAxiom and a practicing cardiologist. It's my pleasure to welcome you to the Cardiovascular Advanced Practice Providers Essential Education Series in Heart Failure. As a guy that is still in the clinical frame and leading MedAxiom, it's very important to me that the physician enterprise works arm-in-arm with advanced practice providers as well as administrative leaders to be sure that we provide the best care for the patient. This series is something that we're committed to to make that happen. There are other parts of the series but we're going to focus on heart failure today. I'd like to introduce Ginger Biesbrock who's our Executive Vice President of Care Transformation. Ginger started her career as a physician assistant and maintains that heart for clinical practice. She is also an expert in administration education and that will shine through as she gives you a more detailed introduction to the speakers and the topics. Again, MedAxiom is committed to education. We're committed to team-based care. We're committed to standard work and guideline-directed medical therapy. Again, all of that will be part of this presentation in our heart failure series. Good luck to all. Thank you. If there's anything we can do to help you here at MedAxiom, please don't hesitate to ask. We are very excited to offer you this academy set of modules related to heart failure management. As many of you know, heart failure is the number one reason Medicare patients are hospitalized over the age of 65. One of the number one reasons patients are readmitted. For those of you that spend a lot of time both in the ambulatory and the acute care space delivering care, you're managing these patients on a daily basis. They're complex. They're complex related to the comorbidities. They're complex related to their treatment regimens. We're trying to manage symptoms while at the same time managing disease progression. Frankly, it doesn't feel like we've made a lot of headway in the last 10 to 20 years when it comes to morbidity and mortality. That being said, there has been a lot of changes. There's been a recent guideline changes that were just put out earlier this year. We have a lot of new therapies that we can offer these patients where we're seeing quite a few benefits and improvement related to hospitalizations and overall quality of life for this patient population. We are thrilled to offer you this next six modules, all things focused on heart failure and even advanced heart failure management. We have several speakers that will be providing the content and are definitely key content experts in their space. They spend their days delivering heart failure care within their communities. And they come to us highly recommended. We're thrilled to initially provide Sandra McCrary, who's a PA, that comes to us with a bachelor's degree from Tribeca Nazarene University in Nashville, Tennessee, and then received her master's from the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. She spent the early years of her career as a PA in family practice and internal medicine, but then evolved into cardiology and ultimately heart failure and the management of heart failure patients within her organization at Ballard Cardiovascular Associates Heart Institute and their heart failure program there. She is a member of the American College of Cardiology, the Heart Failure Society of America, the National Lipid Association, and the American Academy of Physician Assistants, and finally, the Tennessee Academy of Physician Assistants. Sandra is going to really walk us through kind of the basics of heart failure, a little bit related to the epidemiology, patient presentation, diagnostics and diagnostic workup, as well as initial management related to lifestyle changes and guideline-driven medical therapies. Following Sandra, you are going to be providing education from Michelle Weaver. Michelle Weaver is an advanced practice nurse who comes to us from Ohio State University, the Ohio State University, where she spends her time doing advanced care for patients that require bad transplant work. Michelle has worked in this space for many years. She's a certified heart failure nurse. She's a certified critical care registered nurse, and she actively volunteers for the American Heart Association. Michelle is going to spend time with us related to prevention of sudden cardiac death, related to advanced therapies such as VAD, transplant, stage D workup, so what do we do for our advanced patients, as well as novel therapies. As I mentioned earlier, from a pharmacologic perspective, we've come a long way from our foundation of beta blockers and ACE inhibitors. Michelle is going to walk us through what some of those newer pharmacologic management pathways look like. Finally, we will be receiving education from Jennifer Zhang. Jennifer Zhang is a PA who comes to us from Memphis, Tennessee. Jennifer has a fabulous background in genetics and research. She is a PA. She works currently at Sutherland Cardiology Clinic at Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare in Memphis, Tennessee. Prior to that, she originally had her medical training at Peking Union Medical College and Chinese Academy of Medical Science in Beijing, China, of which when she came to the US, she did her postdoctoral training at the University of Tennessee, and then followed by physician assistant studies at the University of Tennessee, from which she is now providing cardiovascular care with a focus on genetics and those cardiomyopathy-type conditions that have a genetic etiology. She's going to walk us through those genetics. She's going to walk us through those conditions and talk about treatment as well as family surveillance and those sorts of things. As you think about and walk through these next six modules, I just want to leave you with a couple of ways that I would encourage that you approach this. Number one, focus on the patients that you're currently managing and think about those heart failure patients. Then as our presenters walk you through some of the basics as well as into the advanced therapies, think about applying that to the patients that you're managing on a daily basis. Think about the way these patients present. Think about the way we make a diagnosis. Remember, heart failure is more of a syndrome, so it's really about how these patients have the hearts no longer keeping things moving forward. If you listen to my module on the essentials, it's as simple as it's a pump that's no longer working effectively to keep everything in forward motion. Things start to back up and the congestion occurs, whether it's in the lung or in the periphery. Think about how we manage our patients to maintain a uvolemic state in which their symptoms are minimal while at the same time the therapy is related to disease progression and how we minimize the remodeling of the myocardium as well as any progression of those issues that may again may be related to valve disease or those sorts of things. Our presenters are going to spend a lot of time with you in this space. I'm thrilled to be able to offer this new academy offering and good luck. Enjoy your time with our presenters. Thank you.

heart failure

collaboration

advanced practice providers

genetic etiologies

patient care