Just a week after Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center in Houston reopened its heart transplant program, CMS sent a letter to the hospital saying it will cut off funding for the program beginning Aug. 17.

Sunil V. Rao, MD, will become the editor-in-chief of the American Heart Association’s journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Interventions on July 1.

The FDA announced on June 21 it has approved the Eversense Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) system, the first fully implantable product of its kind. The device can be worn for up to 90 days, whereas most CGMs are replaced every week or two.

A multidisciplinary group of physicians, nurses, pharmacists and patients teamed up to provide guidelines on how many opioid painkillers should be prescribed following specific procedures.

Continuing cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) appeared to offer no benefit to patients who received a continuous flow left ventricular assist device (CF-LVAD), according to a multicenter study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

Researchers at the University of British Columbia have developed a “smart stent” that can monitor hemodynamic changes in the artery and warn clinicians of restenosis at its earliest stages.

Heart failure patients treated at hospitals with lower 30-day mortality rates also enjoy a survival benefit one, three and even five years later, suggesting a short-term risk-standardized mortality rate (RSMR) may deserve additional weight in CMS’s financial incentive programs.

Transcatheter valve-in-valve replacement for degenerated mitral bioprostheses was associated with similar 30-day and one-year mortality rates as redo surgical mitral valve replacement (SMVR) in a retrospective study, despite the former being performed in older, sicker patients.