Upon stepping into these new roles, Dr. Bavaria has been tasked with establishing a unified structure for Jefferson Health’s cardiac surgery, cardiology, vascular surgery, cardiac anesthesia and vascular medicine programs.
He recently shared with Becker’s his priorities and vision for the future of cardiovascular medicine at Jefferson Health.
Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: As executive director, what are your key priorities for the Heart and Vascular Institute?
Dr. Joseph Bavaria: My biggest priority is to take a fragmented system and functionalize it. We have this very large health system now, and it’s kind of a sum of a bunch of different parts. Ten years ago or so, there were only one or two hospitals. Now there are more than 30, and eight of them have open-heart programs. That means eight of them are big enough to have cardiac and vascular penetration as a major part of the hospital.
[For CEO] Joseph Cacchione, MD, his operational vision is that you can’t really organize a system this big unless you do it by clinical pillars. We have to take all the components of the cardiovascular enterprise, which is cardiology, cardiac surgery, vascular surgery, cardiac anesthesia and critical care, and put them together so they start working as a unit. We can come together and have more functionality by, for example, cross-credentialing and streamlining clinical research. Also utilizing the same databases, registries, quality indices, education and training to have the same care quality across all of our different sites.
Q: What challenges or opportunities for growth do you see as you work toward establishing a unified structure for cardiac surgery, cardiology, vascular surgery, cardiac anesthesia and vascular medicine?
JB: We need to bring in people. If we have a hole here or there, we have to make sure we have the right people leading programs across our whole healthcare system.
Making sure that we have the right folks in the right spots and that we have all clinical bases covered. That’s a challenge, but also one of our growth strategies.
The main thing is, we’re dedicated to our patients and to providing the full gamut of cardiovascular services in all domains. When patients have proper access, it allows Jefferson Health to work efficiently with a dedication to excellence and high-quality outcomes.
