In Global News: ECG via WhatsApp, TAVR on the Cheap in South Africa, and Afternoon Heart Surgery Please

Patient Care

Emergency responders in Argentina use the WhatsApp messaging app to send ECG data to the hospital ahead of a patient’s arrival, and save about 50 minutes by skipping the emergency room on the way to the catheterization lab.

Next year, 150 rheumatic heart disease patients in Cape Town, South Africa, will receive a locally designed, inexpensive transcatheter heart valve as part of a clinical trial.

A cardiac contractility modulation device was implanted to treat heart failure for the first time in the Caribbean at Health City Cayman Islands in Grand Cayman.

A collaboration for training in minimally invasive thoracic surgery is one of many initiatives in a partnership between Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia and the University of Toronto in Canada, which has the goal of transforming health care in Ethiopia.

Drugs and Devices

The first patient has received the Intrepid™ transcatheter mitral valve from Medtronic as part of the APOLLO trial on transcatheter therapy for mitral valve regurgitation.

Artificial intelligence is at an interesting frontier, but how does an always-changing self-improving algorithm get regulatory approval?

Carmat announced that it has performed an artificial heart transplant in Kazakhstan, its first device implantation outside of France.

The US Food and Drug Administration has cleared the Confirm Rx™ Insertable Cardiac Monitor from Abbott, a device that monitors a patient’s heart rhythm and sends the information to their smartphone and their doctor.

Research, Trials, and Funding

A study published in the Lancet suggests that the heart might not be a morning person, at least in regards to surgery.

Researchers from Tel Aviv, Israel, found that both transcatheter and surgical aortic valve replacement were associated with better outcomes than conservative treatment for patients with normal flow-low gradient aortic stenosis.