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Mobile cardiac care center offers hand-on training for doctors

Dr. Steven Krause stood over the patient, concentrating on the X-ray image of the pelvis overhead.

Krause, medical director of the cardiac catheterization lab at the Blessing Heart and Vascular Center, then inserted a wire and inflated a balloon into the artery and placed a stent to hold it open.

Had the procedure gone wrong, it would have been OK.

The "patient" was a computerized mannequin and the cardiac cath lab was a simulator on a 40-foot coach bus parked in a Blessing parking lot on Friday.

Boston Scientific's SimSuite bus provides a virtual cardiac cath lab that gives doctors and other patient care providers a state-of-the-art, hands-on training site on wheels.

"It's a good way to get familiar with the equipment before actually starting on patients," Krause said of the simulator. "You can get the steps down, what you need to do."

He was one of several cardiologists and vascular surgeons who trained on the simulator on Friday, with the focus on endovascular therapy for peripheral vascular disease.

Endovascular therapy for PVD is a less invasive alternative to surgery. It involves opening blocked arteries in the lower extremities with catheters, expandable balloons and stents.

"It's an amazing opportunity," Emily Lane, director of Blessing's cath lab, said about the mobile training. "This provides exceptional one-on-one training" in a risk-free environment.

Lane trained on the mannequin, named "Simantha," along with nine other members of the cardiac cath team, including six registered nurses and three radiology special procedure technicians.

"It's very important to have your team trained," Krause said. "We try to foster at the cath lab that it's not the doctor and everybody else. It's the whole team, and they're professionals."

Shannon Walker, a registered nurse in the cath lab, said the training was an opportunity to better understand how a doctor performs such procedures.

"It's very important to see what goes on on the physician's side," Walker said after trying his hand at repairing a virtual blood vessel.

He emphasized the team concept.

"It's not abnormal for (a doctor) to stop a case and ask, 'What do you think?' There's a lot of collaboration, which makes the team stronger," Walker said.

He was impressed with how real the simulator was.

"It's neat to actually feel the catheter movement and the torque and what it does inside the body," Walker said.

The SimSuite bus is leased to Boston Scientific by Denver-based Medical Simulation Corp., which developed the simulator.

Source: whig.com

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