Geisinger Medical Center was recently given unqualified accreditation as a Chest Pain Center by the Society of Chest Pain Centers. Marie Sledgen, the Level 1 Nurse Coordinator, wrote the accreditation application and supervised the successful site visit. Kim Skelding, MD, has been invited to serve on several committees of the Society for Cardiovascular Angiography and Intervention as co-chair of the Early Career Development Committee, the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association. Geisinger was recently chosen as the only site in Pennsylvania for the AWARE study, testing fibroblast growth factor (Ad5FGF4) as a treatment for non-revascularizeable coronary disease in women. Kim Skelding, MD, was responsible for this success. Spencer King III was the most recent Charles Laubach Visiting Professor at Geisinger Medical Center. He visited on Aug. 10, giving cardiology conference in the morning and medicine grand rounds at noon. The professorship was established to honor Charles Laubach, MD, founder of the Geisinger Cardiology Department and its first catheterization laboratory. Results of Geisinger’s STEMI program, the Level 1 Heart Attack Program for Central PA, was published in the American Journal of Cardiology (September 2007). Marie Sledgen, the Level 1 Nurse Coordinator, has been the driving force behind this successful program. The Geisinger Cardiac Genomics biobanking program has collected blood samples from hundreds of cardiac catheterization patients. Genomic analyses of these samples, combined with clinical data from Geisinger’s electronic medical records, is expected to yield new insights into the genomics of all patient types that present to the cath lab. Peter B. Berger, MD, joined Geisinger as the Associate Chief Research Officer, responsible for clinical trials research throughout the 3 hospital 38 clinic Geisinger Health System. Prior to joining Geisinger, he was a Professor of Medicineand Director of Interventional Cardiology at the Duke University Medical Center, and Co-Director of Cardiovascular Device Research at the Duke Clinical Research Institute. Prior to Duke, Dr. Berger was a Professor of Medicine in the Division of Cardiology at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine for 14 years. He has served on (and chaired) the American Heart Association Committee on Diagnostic and Interventional Catheterization, and on the Cardiac Catheterization and Interventional Cardiology Committees of the American College of Cardiology and the Society of Cardiac Angiography and Intervention. Dr. Berger is a member of the American Board of Internal Medicine and in that capacity helps write the interventional cardiology board exam. Dr. Berger has served on the steering committees of many of the cardiology trials that have shaped clinical practice in the last 20 years. Dr. Berger has authored more than 200 original articles and 13 editorials, published 36 commentaries on clinical trials as the former Director of Clinical Trials for MD Consult, authored or co-authored 17 book chapters, edited 2 books, authored 11 invited publications, developed 10 educational tapes, and given over 200 educational lectures in the US and abroad. From 2004 - 2006, Dr. Berger hosted a nationally televised cath lab conference that was seen live via the GE TiP-TV hospital network or via cathlabconference.org each week by over 5000 viewers. The conferences are archived and can be viewed at any time at cathlabconference.org or on theheart.org. |
