Cardiology Fellowship, Dearborn

The Cardiovascular Disease Fellowship at Beaumont Hospital, Dearborn is a three-year program and consists of comprehensive training in general cardiology that meets or exceeds the standards promulgated by both the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education and the American College of Cardiology.

Cath-lab

A robust part of the Cardiology Fellowship program revolves around the experience in the cardiac catheterization lab. Annually, more than 4,800 cases are performed in the cardiac cath lab at Beaumont Hospital - Dearborn, of which more than 130 are emergent STEMI cases. Other cases include diagnostic coronary angiograms, diagnostic right heart catheterizations, planned PCI, TAVR, PFO closures, pacemaker implantations as well as vascular studies and interventions.

One-third of the first year of fellowship is spent caring for patients in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit. The CCU is an eighteen bed open unit which delivers critical care to patients with severe cardiac diseases such as the acute coronary syndromes, acute decompensated heart failure and life-threatening arrhythmias. During the time spent in the CCU, the fellow acts as a junior attending, working with residents and interns from the hospital’s Internal Medicine, Family Medicine and Transitional Year programs.

The interpretation and application of non-invasive cardiac imaging plays a large role in the practice of a Cardiologist. Therefore, fellows spend a significant amount of time rotating in the hospital’s echocardiography lab, stress lab and nuclear imaging department. The volume of echocardiography performed at our site is enormous. Annually, nearly 10,000 transthoracic echocardiograms are done, as well as almost 1,000 transesophageal echocardiograms. Additionally, the stress lab completes approximately 100 dobutamine stress echocardiogram studies and 300 exercise stress echocardiogram studies every year. More than 3,000 nuclear stress imaging exams are completed at Beaumont Hospital – Dearborn every year. Fellows are also taught the interpretation of exercise treadmill stress exams, ambulatory Holter and event monitor interpretations as well as the analysis of standard electrocardiograms.

Clinic

Cardiology fellows spend one morning weekly in their general cardiology clinic throughout all three years of training. Clinic is staffed with cardiologists having decades of clinical experience. Additionally, non-invasive testing for our clinic patients is available on-site. The practice has a large staff of nurses, techs and other support staff which provides a smoothly running clinic experience for our fellows. Finally, our practice is supported by a full-time nurse practitioner who provides great assistance in the delivery of patient care.

Fellows are provided with one month of dedicated research time. Time may be spent developing on-site clinical research or quality improvement initiatives, the authorship of manuscripts for conference presentations, preparation of lectures to be shared at academic meetings, or studying in preparation of the board examinations which are offered toward the end of fellowship training. In the past, fellows have presented at meetings such as the ACC Scientific Sessions, Michigan ACC Annual Conference and other annual society gatherings.

WernsACC

Toward the beginning of fellowship, Cardiology fellows rotate on the cardiac electrophysiology service for a total of two months. During this period of time, they are exposed to the medical management of a wide variety of cardiac arrhythmias, in both the in-patient and out-patient clinical settings. A large component of the rotations involves time spent in the EP Lab. Beaumont – Dearborn has a very busy cardiac electrophysiology service, performing more than 70 EP studies, more than 350 device implants (pacemaker and ICD) and almost 400 intra-cardiac ablations (atrial fibrillation, atrial flutter, SVT) annually.