News

Dr. Pan Ma joined the Department of Medicine in the Cardiovascular Division as an instructor in May 2024. As a researcher, she has made significant contributions to the understanding of myocarditis disease. Her work has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals and presented at prestigious conferences, earning them recognition as a competitive early career investigator.

Congratulations to PROUD-MED Scholar Zainab Mahmoud, MD, MSc (Internal Medicine, Cardiology) on the funding of her K23 “Improving Maternal Cardiovascular Outcomes Through the Implementation of a Hypertensive Disorders of Pregnancy Bundle in Nigeria”, 1K23HL173684-01.

Recently, four members of the Cardiovascular Division faculty completed a 16-week pilot leadership course on the Fundamentals of Performance Improvement and Change Management presented by the Department of Medicine. Sixteen faculty members participated across the school of medicine: representing the Cardiovascular Division were Division Chief Dr. Sumanth Prabhu, and Drs. Mustafa Husaini, Justin Sadhu, and Sudhir Jain.

Associate Professor of Medicine and Associate Director of the Wash U Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy Center, Dr. Sharon Cresci is Vice-Chair on a new statement published this week in the journal Circulation on behalf of the American Heart Association.

Dr. Howard Kurz, Professor of Medicine in the Cardiovascular Division, will retire at the end of June. Dr. Kurz has served as Director of the Interventional Cardiology Training Program as well as Director of the Cardiac Procedure Center Catheterization Laboratory. He has been an essential part of the interventional cardiology team, and his mentorship and leadership will be greatly missed.

More than 184 million people, exceeding 61% of the U.S. population, are likely to have some type of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and total CVD-related costs are expected to triple to $1.8 trillion by 2050, according to projections reported in two new American Heart Association presidential advisories

With the advent of the AI-based writing tool ChatGPT, attention has focused on assisting physicians with one of their most burdensome tasks, clinical documentation. Each of the four area health systems is developing an AI scribe function. BJC HealthCare and its academic partner, Washington University School of Medicine, are conducting pilots of several AI products to help generate clinical notes. Thomas Maddox, MD, SM, who leads the Healthcare Innovation Lab at BJC and Washington University, described the effort: “We installed a product in the exam room that records the clinical encounter. At the conclusion of the visit, it feeds the audio transcription into a large language model like ChatGPT. Then that model transforms the recording into a clinical note following the format that physicians often use. The physician then reviews and edits the draft instead of starting with a blank page.”