Maggie McKay (Host): When you need to have surgery for cardiovascular issues, it's useful to know all you can about where you'll be treated. Today, we'll find out more about the Heart and Vascular Institute at Valley Health System and what they offer.

Welcome to the debut episode of Conversations Like No Other Heart Care, presented by the Heart and Vascular Institute of Valley Health System in Paramus, New Jersey. In each episode, you'll hear from a Valley cardiac specialist go beyond broad everyday cardiac topics to discuss very real and very specific subjects that impact your heart health. We think you'll enjoy our fresh take. Please consider subscribing to this podcast and our flagship podcast, Conversations Like No Other. Thanks for listening.

Today, we have with us Dr. Suneet Mittal, Chair of the Cardiovascular Service Line at Valley Health System to discuss innovations, technologies, and research at Valley Health System. Thank you so much for being here today, Dr. Mittal. It's so great to have you.

Dr. Suneet Mittal: Well, it's great to be here. Thank you for having me.

Host: Absolutely. Let's get right into it. How have innovations in technology transformed the way we approach heart health and treatment in recent years?

Dr. Suneet Mittal: Well, that's a great question, and I think that one of the biggest advances has been smart technology. Today, everyone walks around with a smart watch or smartphone. And we all know that these can start to record physiologic signals, and many people are tracking not only their activity level, but often even their heart rate or heart rhythm. If you extend that forward into more of a hospitalized setting, we've seen such advances in minimally invasive procedures, advanced imaging technologies, big data science, of course, artificial intelligence, robotics, and the net result of this is that we feel we can do more for people, get them recovered faster, and have them return to a normal life quicker.

Host: This is so exciting. You know, with the rise of digital health tools, how can remote monitoring and wearable technology improve heart disease management?

Dr. Suneet Mittal: Well, remote monitoring technology can be helpful in a number of different areas. It helps you with early detection and diagnosis of disease. It allows for a more personalized and proactive care delivery, certainly for chronic diseases such as high blood pressure, for example, or even congestive heart failure. Having data remotely can really help us treat patients for the better. And I think with using remote technology, what we have seen is that patients are more engaged. When patients are more engaged, they're more in tune to their healthcare, and we believe that that then reduces hospitalizations, the cost of healthcare delivery, and leads to a patient who's feeling less sick and more well.

Host: Well, sounds like a win-win all the way around. How have minimally invasive procedures evolved, and what benefits do they offer for patients with heart conditions?

Dr. Suneet Mittal: Well, you started off this program talking about cardiac surgery. And in fact, when people thought about Cardiology, they think about big surgical procedures, the prototyping open heart surgery. But today, so much of what we can do is done by minimally invasive procedures. There have been advances in valvular heart disease. For example, what used to require an open heart surgical procedure to replace an aortic valve, for example, can be done through a minimally invasive procedure called transcatheter aortic valve replacement, or TAVR, and patients can literally walk out of the hospital the day following their new valve. We can treat arrhythmias like atrial fibrillation using technology such as catheter ablation, which allows us to rid patients of this arrhythmia and get them home often the same day. Even something like pacemakers, which for 50 years have been done in exactly the same way, incision, requiring an operative intervention, can now be done with minimally invasive procedures where we can place something called a leadless pacemaker, one that if a patient was in front of you, you wouldn't even know that a pacemaker was present in their body. And these are just three of the more common examples of how minimally invasive procedures are really changing the paradigm of how healthcare is delivered on a daily basis.

Host: When you started out in medical school, did you ever imagine any of these options?

Dr. Suneet Mittal: Absolutely not. And I'll go even further. You know, almost 90% of what I do on a daily basis today wasn't even around when I started my training in the field that I am in today. And it just speaks to how rapid the pace of innovation is and what an exciting time it is to deliver healthcare. But also, if you have the unfortunate circumstance to be ill, there's so much that can be offered today that wasn't possible even a few years ago.

Host: That's so encouraging. Let's talk about artificial intelligence. How is AI being used in the diagnosis and the treatment of heart diseases? And what impact does it have on patient outcomes?

Dr. Suneet Mittal: Well, as you know, artificial intelligence is the big buzzword of the year in the last several years, but I can assure you that its utility is real. Artificial intelligence is being used in the diagnosis of disease, so we can detect diseases earlier, faster, help us predict who's likely to get sick and not sick. This is allowing us to use this information for personalized approaches to treatment in patients. Artificial intelligence is helping us plan for procedures such as ablation or TAVR using very sophisticated imaging types of support. And so, the net result of this is that, again, it's allowing us to deliver a very personalized level of care to patients that was not previously possible.

Host: Dr. Mittal, looking ahead, what emerging technologies or research in heart health are you most excited about? And how do you see them shaping the future of cardiovascular care?

Dr. Suneet Mittal: I'm really excited for a number of technologies. I'm even more excited for the fact that at Valley Health System, we're poised to make all of these available to our patients. And I would say some of the big areas that we're going to be focusing in on, continued improvements in wearable and implantable health sensors to help us early detect and manage conditions like arrhythmias, high blood pressure, congestive heart failure. We're definitely going to enter the era of artificial intelligence and machine learning to help us deliver a more personalized approach to our patients. There's also going to be investments in robotics and augmented and virtual reality to give us more precise interventions, especially for patients with structural heart disease. As you know, bioprinting and regenerative medicine are down the road. And I think that when you put all of this together, I think the future is very, very bright for patients with cardiovascular diseases.

Host: Very encouraging and hopeful. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise today.

Dr. Suneet Mittal: Well, thank you very much for having me. It's been a true pleasure.

Host: Thank you again. That's Dr. Suneet Mittal. If you found this podcast helpful, please share it on your social channels and check out our entire podcast library for topics of interest to you. Thanks for listening to Conversations Like No Other Heart Care presented by the Heart and Vascular Institute at Valley Health System in Paramus, New Jersey.

For more information on today's topic, or to be connected with today's guest, please call 201-291-6090 or email valleypodcast@valleyhealth.com.