September 5th, 2011 by DrWes in News
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I know what you’re thinking. “Did he fire six shots or only five?” Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky?
Well, do ya, punk?
Harry Callihan, from the movie Dirty Harry
It was a small article in the Wall Street Journal on 8 August 2011: “Zoll Medical Falls As LifeVest May Face Reimbursement Revisions.” No doubt most doctors missed this, but the implications of this article for our patients discovered to have weak heart muscles and considered at high risk for sudden cardiac death could be profound.
That’s because Medicare (CMS) is considering the requirement for the same waiting period after diagnosis of a cardiomyopathy or myocardial infarction as that for permanent implantable cardiac defibrillators (ICDs). To this end, they issued a draft document that contains the new proposal for their use. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Dr. Wes*
March 9th, 2011 by DrWes in Opinion, True Stories
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On September 27, 2010, the peer-reviewed scientific journal Europace published online-before-print a case report entitled “Spontaneous explosion of implantable cardioverter-defibrillator” by Martin Hudec and Gabriela Kaliska. In the pdf of that case report a figure containing a color photo of the affected patient’s chest, chest X-ray, and two pictures of the extracted device (one seen here) were included.
The pictures and case presentation were dramatic and the case very rare. Both were perfect reasons to report such an important case to the medical literature. And so these doctors sent the case to Europace on June 29, 2010, and the article was accepted after revision on August 16, 2010, with the article appearing online September 27, 2010.
The authors must have felt very proud to have an article published relatively quickly, and the editors and reviewers of Europace must have thought the case was unique enough and important enough to have the article revised according to their specifications, then published online — until I reported the case on this blog on October 5, 2010, and included images from a portion of the case report’s figure.
Remarkably, later that same day, Europace removed the case report from its website without comment. The article simply vanished. I attempted to e-mail the editor of Europace to inquire about the reason for the retraction but received no reply, so I contacted the lead author, Martin Hudec, M.D. He kindly responded and I included his email response in the comments to my post two days later. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Dr. Wes*
December 2nd, 2010 by John Mandrola, M.D. in Better Health Network, News, Opinion, Research
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In treating atrial fibrillation (AF), this year has witnessed some real excitement. And not all the good news has to do with new pills. Recently, there has been a flurry of encouraging and objective news on ablating AF. Here are some comments on three notable studies that address three important questions:
1. What are the “long-term” success rates of AF ablation?
On this important question comes an American Heart Association (AHA) abstract from the highly-regarded lab of Dr. Karl-Heinz Kuck in Hamburg. They report on a relatively young cohort of 161 patients who underwent AF ablation (using standard pulmonary vein isolation techniques) in 2003-2004. At an average of five years of follow up, more than 80 percent were either AF-free or “clinically improved.”
Real-world impression: Although late recurrences of AF years after successful ablation have been reported, my impression (having started with AF ablation in 2004) is that most who are AF-free off drugs after one year have remained AF-free thus far. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Dr John M*
October 8th, 2010 by DrWes in Better Health Network, Health Tips, News, Opinion, Research
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Have a defibrillator and feel like getting frisky? For the first time that I can recall, there’s a very helpful article published in Circulation addresses the concerns of implantable cardiac defibrillator (ICD) patients and sexual activity. There’s all kinds of helpful tidbits, like this one:
A study of 1,774 patients who had experienced an acute myocardial infarction showed that sexual activity was a likely contributor in fewer than 1 percent of cases. In fact, regular physical exertion, such as that associated with sexual activity, was associated with a decreased risk of cardiac events in patients.
Now that’s helpful!
Recall that defibrillators are designed to detect rapid, potentially life-threatening arrhythmias. Most of the time, sexual activity does not lead to heart rates at a level that ICD’s would consider elevated during intercourse. (This, of course is patient specific). While your doctor can tell you the rate cut-off at which your ICD might possibly fire, watching your heart rate rise with a monitor during those moments might be a bit of a, shall we say, turn-off. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Dr. Wes*
June 7th, 2010 by DrWes in Better Health Network, Health Policy, Opinion
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When I started medical school, if someone had told me that providing healthcare to my patients would be grounds for a Department of Justice inquiry into the care I delivered, I would have laughed in their face. But the government’s desperate financial times require desperate measures. From the Report on Medicare Compliance:
Both the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Recovery Audit Contractors (RAC) are focusing investigations on Medicare billing for implantable cardiac defibrillator (ICD) surgery. The reimbursement rate for ICD surgery is one of the higher dollar Medicare Severity Diagnosis Related Groupings (MS-DRG). The DOJ’s investigation is focusing on both medical necessity and MS-DRG coding validation issues, while the RACs are currently only conducting MS-DRG validation reviews. According to the CMS national coverage determination (NCD), Medicare pays for ICD implantation for eight specific conditions. However, there are many circumstantial limitations to coverage in these conditions that often lead to CMS not covering the implantation. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Dr. Wes*
