President's Message

May 2021

Dear PaACC Chapter Colleagues,

My name is Srinath Adusumalli, and I am honored to be serving you and PaACC as the organization’s new president, with a term spanning the next 18 months. I am also the Eastern PA governor and thrilled to be working with our new Western PA governor, Ross Peterson, MD, FACC, as well as our chapter executive, Jennifer Ray Beckman, to lead our chapter. I am an Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, one of our health system’s assistant chief medical information officers focused on connected health, and an assistant program director for our cardiovascular disease fellowship program.

I first want to thank Doctors Katie Berlacher and Andy Waxler for their incredible leadership of the chapter and its activities over the last three years. Despite the tremendous challenges of the last few years, they have accomplished a great amount on behalf of our patients and members, on a wide variety of important issues, from impactful advocacy work resulting in meaningful practice change, to implementing novel, accessible educational programming for our members, to leading several initiatives focused on promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in cardiology. We are grateful they will be continuing to contribute to the activities of the chapter as members of our PaACC council.

Going forward, through this newsletter, we would like to highlight some fantastic PaACC and ACC activities/initiatives that might be of interest to you.

Notable PaACC activities

• The PaACC is hosting a follow up question/answer forum to its webinar “Developing a Racially Diverse Medical Team” (recording linked here), focused on addressing important and challenging topics regarding diversity in the cardiovascular workforce.  The session will be on Thursday, May 26 at 5pm on Zoom. Register here for the Zoom link

• In collaboration with New York chapter of the ACC and the Women in Cardiology and Early Career member sections of the ACC, the PaACC has been awarded a grant to develop a 4-part workshop series on “Microaggressions, Bias and Toxicity: Navigating Difficult Interactions in Cardiology" – register for the first session on “Tackling Hostility and Conflict Management: Negotiation and Confrontation Skills”, occurring on Wednesday, May 25 at 5:30pm on Zoom, here.
• The CVTeam section has just wrapped up their 2021-2022 season of their journal club series, titled “Wine, Cheese, and Heart Disease”. Congratulations to our CVTeam leaders on a tremendously successful and educational set of sessions – we will feature topics from the upcoming 2022-2023 season in this email in subsequent months.

News from the ACC

• The ACC has followed up its initial guidance on the new US Preventive Services Task Force recommendations on the use of aspirin to prevent cardiovascular disease with this useful CardioSmart infographic, intended for use with patients. While on the CardioSmart site, be sure to check out the many helpful patient education resources the College has developed
• The College has developed a dedicated resource page with helpful information in navigating the current iodinated contrast media shortage – it is linked here.
• Finally, the ACC has continued to develop its Collaborative Maintenance Pathway, a convenient way to meet all of your education, licensure/CME, and ABIM Maintenance of Certification needs in one program, all delivered through the ACC’s Self-Assessment Programs (SAPs including ACCSAP, CathSAP, EP SAP, and HF SAP) – learn more through a short video here.

I am looking forward to serving and working with all of you over the next 18 months. Check out our website at www.pcacc.org, follow us on Twitter @PAChapterACC, and please reach out any time via president@pcacc.org with questions, ideas, needs or if you would like to get involved in PaACC activities.

Srinath Adusumalli, MD, MSHP, MBMI, FACC

President, PaACC

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