This transradial approach can improve patient outcomes, especially in high-risk patients. More than 70 percent of our cardiac catheterization procedures involve access through the radial artery - almost twice the national average - and we have seen clear benefits in terms of lower bleeding, fewer vascular complications, and improved patient satisfaction.
Procedure rehearsal and simulation leads to a level of comfort intraprocedurally, especially for trainees lacking high volume of experience. Our Mentice simulator allows our trainees to spend both supervised time learning procedural nuances/details and unsupervised time to perfect procedural techniques. During the supervised sessions, trainees are able to ask more questions, which improves their knowledge and understanding leading to improved patient care during live procedures. Additionally, it is a vehicle for team-based simulation sessions that can improve team dynamics for patient care and safety.
We have been using the Mentice solution in the specific setting of performing the Cardioband procedure in tricuspid and mitral interventions, so what we have done is to import patient-specific data into the simulator and then the day before the intervention we have practiced on that dataset in the simulator. In this way, we have been able to identify specific parts of the intervention which are more difficult, and we can then go back and look at how to speed up those parts of the procedure. One thing that I think has been particularly useful is for the echo operators to be able to identify where they might run into problems with getting the correct image quality.