Right off the heels of Heart Rhythm 2018 in Boston, Lars Thording writes his Five Key Takeways for Diagnostic and Interventional Cardiology. Among others, Dr. Thording notes that device costs have hampered AF ablation procedure growth:
If the cardiac arrhythmia treatment approach is to reach its potential, innovation should be focused on systems and treatment solutions that dramatically improve efficacy, reduce complexity and increase access while lowering costs.
And, reprocessors represented the few vendors on the exhibit floor were focused on lowering costs:
Stryker’s Sustainability Solutions as well as Innovative Health represented an exception to this with their offering of single-use device reprocessing. The idea for their services is to lower the cost of procedures without compromising safety and functionality of devices. These vendors offer a process to clean, test and sterilize devices, including lumen cleaning and valve integrity inspection.