CRF, ACC Partnership Enhances Interventional Education, Science Worldwide

Since the Cardiovascular Research Foundation and American College of Cardiology Foundation announced an educational collaboration at TCT 2010, a number of efforts have been made to formalize and expand the existing relationship between the two organizations.

“We believe the entire cardiology community — interventionalists, surgeons, clinicians, researchers, nurse practitioners, nurses and technicians — will continue to benefit from this increasingly close level of collaboration between the ACC Foundation and CRF,” Gregg W. Stone, MD, TCT Course Director and co-director of the Medical Education and Research Division at CRF, stated. “Working together, the ACC and CRF are filling a critical need for continuous cutting-edge medical education that ensures appropriate use of innovative new interventional treatments and therapies which improve outcomes for patients.”

New collaborative efforts

Beginning this year, the ACC Foundation is the official co-sponsor of TCT, now known as TCT in Partnership with ACC. The collaboration also allows CRF to continue to aid in the selection of interventional content for the ACC-i2 with TCT Meeting at the ACC’s 61st Scientific Sessions on March 24-27, 2012. Beginning in 2013, this meeting will be renamed “TCT at ACC: Innovations in Interventions” and will include even more shared offerings for interventionalists. Submissions are currently being accepted for abstracts and cases in the topics of coronary and endovascular intervention and structural heart disease, and a structural heart program is in development, according to information from the ACC. Also at TCT 2011, the ACC Foundation is providing nurse accreditation, which includes the 20th Annual Cardiovascular Nurse and Technologist Symposium, a program designed for registered CV invasive specialists with a forum to learn and discuss the latest advances in interventional, pharmacologic, structural heart and endovascular strategies for the management of CV patients. Both organizations are collaborating on educational materials and news reporting from the two conferences, and all TCT abstracts will be published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

Moving forward, the partnership will allow the two organizations to develop and share Web content for CardioSource and TCTMD; build and promote national and international educational meetings; and advance young faculty and investigational programs to continue to search for and nurture future leaders and practitioners.

“Both organizations are interested in providing the very best educational content for members and are incredibly keen on making sure we get the science, education and application just right,” ACC president David R. Holmes, MD, told TCT Daily. “The partnership is aimed at working together and improving global CV care.”

A major point of focus has been to align CME and industry relationship/conflicts of interest policies in an effort to take a leadership role in the cardiology field. The organizations have harmonized their relationships with industry disclosure processes for CME/CNE activities at the TCT and ACC annual meetings. “This will hopefully help establish a standard for cardiovascular programs,” Gary S. Mintz, MD, medical director and editor-in-chief of TCTMD, said in an interview. Mintz is also Chief Medical Officer at CRF.

Strength in numbers

The collaboration builds upon a preexisting partnership agreement between the two organizations that was initiated in 2008. According to Mintz, the collaborative process is “evolving in its relative infancy” and more is to be expected in the future. A physician-led collaborative council comprising senior physician leaders from both organizations meets regularly to review progress and set the direction of the affiliation. With the partnership, however, TCT will remain a CRF event and the i2 Summit will remain an ACC event.

“CRF and ACC have different strengths and weaknesses,” Mintz told TCT Daily. “Education outside the sphere of interventional cardiovascular medicine is not a strength of CRF but is clearly a strength of the ACC. For the ACC, CRF is trying to focus on educating the noninterventional community about interventional cardiology more and more. These two disciplines should not function in vacuums.”