TCT 2019 News: HeartFlow Planner and Cost-effectiveness Analysis
This year’s Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics (TCT) conference was terrific, as it gave me a chance to learn the latest structural heart and PCI data, and reconnect with friends and colleagues. As the Chief Medical Officer of a company that provides a technology that combines anatomy and physiology, I was encouraged that throughout the week at TCT, there was a strong emphasis on how anatomy and physiology provide different, complementary, and equally important pieces of information to help practitioners optimize treatment for patients.
There were also a couple of exciting HeartFlow updates at TCT. The first was a cost-effectiveness analysis of HeartFlow, which was presented by Dr. Udo Hoffmann of Massachusetts General Hospital. The objective was to compare the cost-effectiveness of three alternative non-invasive testing strategies (non-invasive functional testing, coronary CTA alone or coronary CTA + HeartFlow when indicated) in patients with stable chest pain. For the analysis, Hoffmann and his team applied Markov modeling, a well-established probabilistic method, on 10,003 patients from the PROMISE trial. Using this technique, the key findings were that a coronary CTA + HeartFlow testing pathway resulted in:
- The highest yield for obstructive coronary artery disease in patients going to the cath lab (86%);
- The highest ratio of revascularization to diagnostic angiography (60%);
- A dominant strategy compared to functional testing (improved patient outcomes and lower costs);
- Cost-savings compared to coronary CTA alone (similar outcomes and lower costs)
The second HeartFlow update at TCT was the introduction of HeartFlow Planner, a non-invasive, realtime planning tool that enables interventional cardiologists to model vessels virtually, and to preview different treatment strategies. HeartFlow Planner is now FDA cleared, and we are currently working with a few sites on beta evaluation to understand how it fits best into pre- and intra-procedural workflows. During TCT, we were able to gather feedback from clinicians on how they might envision using HeartFlow Planner in their practices. The feedback overall has been encouraging and we look forward to making Planner more broadly available in 2020.
— A perspective from HeartFlow Chief Medical Officer, Campbell Rogers, MD
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