Texas Heart Institute at St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital Now Offers
Continuing Medical Education Credits Online

HOUSTON (June 7, 2005) The Texas Heart Institute at St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital now offers physicians and other medical professionals continuing medical education (CME) credit online at its website, www.texasheartinstitute.org. While Texas Heart Institute symposia have been available for online viewing for some time now, "Advances in the Treatment of Cardiovascular Disease" is the first symposium to provide physicians CME credit. Physicians must complete at least 50 hours of CME credit every year, if not more, depending on their level of specialization.

"Advances in the Treatment of Cardiovascular Disease" discusses current medical therapies and surgical treatment for patients with cardiovascular disease. The faculty addresses guidelines for managing risk factors, including obesity, hypertension, diabetes, and dyslipidemia. The faculty also focus on what the practitioner can do to optimize outcomes such as reducing cardiovascular disease mortality and morbidity. The primary audience includes physicians with specialties in cardiology and internal medicine.

Specifically, the program addresses:

• Challenges to Preventing and Treating Obesity
• Diabetes: A Modern-Day Epidemic
• Metabolic Syndrome: Developing a Rational Approach for Patients with Multiple Risk Factors
• New Surgical Options for Treating Cardiovascular Disease
• Modern Management of Acute Coronary Syndromes
• Contemporary Treatment of Heart Failure

"These topics are very important in improving public well being, and by applying this knowledge, the community doctor can make a big impact on their patient outcomes. I believe obtaining CME online is the way of the future because doctors can do this on their own time, whenever they want. With schedules getting more difficult due to higher demands on the time of physicians, this is becoming more important. Doctors are just too busy to attend a lot of meetings," said Reynolds Delgado, MD, director of Mechanical Support Devices in Heart Failure at the Texas Heart Institute at St. Luke's and the program director for this symposium.

"Advances in multimedia presentations on the internet allows us to put the same images and slides presented at the meeting online. This technology allows doctors to view presentations at their own pace and be able to refer back to it whenever they want. This is a great advance which now makes it very powerful medium for learning on the internet," said Dr. Delgado.

The Texas Heart Institute is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education to sponsor continuing medical education for physicians. The Texas Heart Institute designates this educational activity for 4.5 credit hours in Category 1 of the Physician's Recognition Award of the American Medical Association.

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World-renowned cardiovascular surgeon Denton A. Cooley, MD, founded the Texas Heart Institute in 1962 for the study and treatment of diseases of the heart and blood vessels. Together with the Institute's clinical partner, St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital, it has been ranked for the past 14 years among the nation's top ten heart centers in an annual survey published by U.S.News & World Report.