By Denise Williams | News & Views
Two mainstays of the AACVPR Annual Meeting that consistently draw a crowd are the educational sessions covering new research findings in the fields of cardiac and pulmonary rehabilitation. Brian Carlin, MD, MAACVPR, FCCP, FAARC, has delivered the presentation on the PR side for nearly 25 years; but in 2022, he simply couldn’t make it to September’s convention in West Palm Beach, Florida.
A Plethora of PR Research…
PR professionals who were disappointed to see this session missing from the schedule of events were no doubt pleased to learn of Dr. Carlin's plans to present an AACVPR webinar on the newest know-how. There certainly wasn't any lack of material, he noted, teasing some of the most impactful papers that have been published over the past year. For one, there’s the study showing that for patients who undergo pulmonary rehab following their hospital stay, the mortality rate is lower. There’s also the important evidence demonstrating the cost-effectiveness of pulmonary rehab – a finding that doesn’t surprise Dr. Carlin, although he is perplexed that it took so long for somebody to actually do the research on it. Then there’s the work on the best way to exercise a person in order to obtain optimal results for that individual patient. The list goes on. While there are dozens of papers that reflect what was learned about pulmonary rehab in the past year, Dr. Carlin used the one-hour webcast on January 11 to take a closer look at several select articles.
…And Practical Application of the Findings
At the end of his recap, Dr. Carlin spent some time going over the implications for practice, with the intent of demonstrating "how I think this clinical research can be transitioned to caring for their patients.”
Doing so is critical, he insists, because new research often is underutilized – thus not providing patients with the newest thoughts in the field. “The patients don’t get the best bang for the buck, so to speak,” Dr. Carlin suggests, when programs operate the same way over time and fail to consider changes that have occurred over the years. “My feeling is that if you’re not trying to improve your delivery of services, patients don’t benefit as much as possible,” he continues. “You need to continually try to make the patients’ lives better by providing them with the most up-to-date findings in the field.”
Getting the latest findings in front of PR professionals has been a purposeful goal for Dr. Carlin for many years, which is why he regrets having to miss the 37th Annual Meeting last fall. After all, he points out, the people who attend the event each year are, in addition to those who have actually conducted the research, the healthcare providers who actually do the work in PR and arguably have the greatest use for it. That’s why he’s bringing 2022’s “lost” presentation to the webinar format and why, if you work in pulmonary rehab, you won’t want to miss it. If you couldn't attend the livestream event, you can still catch earn a CE credit by watching the webinar recording available at no cost to members.