The Inaugural 2021 Great Debates and Updates in Electrophysiology

To celebrate EP Lab Digest’s (EPLD) 20 years in print this year, our publisher, HMP Global, initiated its first-ever EP meeting entitled Great Debates and Updates in Electrophysiology (GDU EP). This virtual meeting was held over three days from April 22-24, 2021, and included a total of 15 sessions that took place on a Thursday evening, Friday afternoon, and Saturday morning. Several efforts were made to make this first meeting different than other virtual educational EP meetings held during the COVID pandemic. We focused on making the format, topics, and faculty representative of the entire readership of EPLD — physicians, nurses, midlevel providers, EP lab technicians, device clinic staff, trainees, patients, and industry partners. The event was outstanding.

The fresh format of GDU EP was designed to break away from the all-too-common program format of continuous PowerPoint slides by promoting conversation and panel discussion as well as limiting the time spent on slide presentations to 20-30% of each overall session. Sessions were formatted as either a 5-minute case presentation followed by faculty discussion, or a short 10-minute debate followed by rebuttals and panel discussion. This allowed for a format similar to a news network, with a single moderator generating lively conversation among the expert faculty panelists. Topics were also selected to be of interest to the entire readership of EPLD. We covered the usual topics including new technologies for catheter ablation, ablation of left ventricular summit PVCs, physiological pacing, and defibrillation testing with the subcutaneous ICD, but also discussed the role of nurse practitioners in an EP program, how to improve start times and reduce delays in turnaround times in the EP lab, patient education and lifestyle modification for patients with atrial fibrillation, and same-day discharge protocols after EP procedures. We had 41 outstanding and diverse faculty that included 11 women and 5 nurses. We had engaging and dynamic sessions with true experts, including one session related to the role of EP testing in patients with Brugada syndrome with Professor Josep Brugada himself debating Professor Sami Viskin.

I want to thank and congratulate our course directors for an outstanding inaugural 2021 GDU EP: Jessica Charron, APN, Aseem Desai, MD, David Haines, MD, Susan Kim, MD, and Raul Weiss, MD. I also want to thank everyone in the audience for joining us and thank our sponsors and organizers for helping us make it happen. If you missed the program or want to view parts of it again, all live sessions will also be available on demand until the end of July 2021 at https://bit.ly/gduEP21. Looking forward to another GDU EP meeting next year! 

Stay safe,

Bradley P. Knight, MD, FACC, FHRS