Program overview

Curriculum 

Join a three-year program based on recommendations from the American College of Cardiology that covers all aspects of noninvasive and invasive clinical cardiology. You’ll have opportunities for teaching and research. And your training will be enhanced by attendance at clinical conferences, grand rounds and research seminars.

The academic year is divided into 13 four-week rotations. During your first two years, you’ll become familiar with all the major areas of clinical activity and receive special training in noninvasive and invasive lab skills. You’ll also start a mentored research project. 

In your third year, you’ll focus on an area of interest such as interventional cardiology, electrophysiology, noninvasive imaging, general and preventive cardiology or congestive heart failure. 

You’ll do most rotations at Geisinger Medical Center in Danville. But you’ll also complete rotations at Geisinger Wyoming Valley Medical Center in the city of Wilkes-Barre, where you’ll see a different array of disease acuity and pathology. 

Inpatient and outpatient care

Inpatient care focuses on a 30-bed acute care unit and more than 100 telemetry beds that serve more than 3,000 patients a year. You’ll be part of a team that includes an attending cardiologist, internal medicine and emergency medicine residents, medical students, a pharmacist and a social worker. 

You will:

• Evaluate and treat acute cardiac illness
• Diagnose and manage non-acute cardiac problems
• Consult for assessment of concomitant cardiovascular diseases in patients admitted to other hospital services 

The outpatient clinic serves more than 12,000 patients each year. You’ll evaluate newly referred patients and see patients with pacemakers and defibrillator devices. You’ll also have opportunities to access an adult congenital heart disease clinic and a heart failure clinic. 

Diagnostic and therapeutic services 

You’ll participate in all aspects of diagnostic and therapeutic services provided by the cardiology department, which includes:

Three cardiac catheterization labs where we perform 2,400 procedures each year, including diagnostic catheterization and coronary intervention.

• A dedicated electrophysiology lab and minor procedure room where we implant about 200 pacemakers and cardioverter-defibrillators each year. The electrophysiology service also provides ambulatory electrocardiographic monitoring, tilt-table studies and diagnostic and therapeutic invasive electrophysiological studies such as catheter ablation of supraventricular and ventricular arrhythmias. 
• An electrocardiographic lab and pacemaker clinic that performs about 38,000 electrocardiographic studies a year. 
• An exercise lab where we perform more than 4,000 cardiac exercise stress echocardiographic and nuclear cardiology studies each year. Pharmacologic stress tests are done with the use of vasodilators (adenosine) or inotropic agents (dobutamine) in combination with echocardiography, nuclear imaging (99mTc-sestamibi) or cardiac magnetic resonance imaging. All fellows can obtain Level II certification in nuclear cardiology.
• A fully digital echocardiographic lab with state-of-the-art ultrasound machines that can perform outpatient and bedside transthoracic and transesophageal studies, stress and three-dimensional echocardiography and assessment of ventricular dyssynchrony. We average about 13,000 studies each year.