Development update

Please excuse the delay in reporting to you the minutes of the meeting of May 5th ATS meeting. We had a good turnout with representatives at the meeting including Drs. Thurani, Silvestry, Disesa, Garcia, Ferdinand, Banbury, Bridges, and Savage. The portal was introduced and we made final decisions as to the appearance and hope to go live with this quite soon. There are still a number of issues behind the scenes that need to be resolved, but are close to completion. At this meeting, a number of issues were covered, including new ideas and the potential to create more assignments. Dr. Silvestry has made great strides working on clinical algorithms and we hope to have the first clinical algorithm available to put up with the portal page when it goes live. Dr. Thurani has been working on pulling clinical cases and we hope to reactivate what has become a somewhat dormant area.

The Expert’s Technique Section continues to grow slowly. We periodically receive submissions and post the worthy submissions as accepted. We have also had a number of video submissions lately. At the meeting I asked people to commit to particular areas of interest. Dr. Silvestry will continue to do the clinical algorithms; Dr. Thourani will continue to do the clinical cases. Dr. Disesa expressed interest in creating a repository of pictures with graphs and charts that can be used for presentations to the hospital administration or other parties elucidating facts about issues relevant to adult cardiac surgery. Dr. Banbury expressed interest in approaching issues of evidence based in conjunction with Dr. Bridges.

I will be sending out a more formal survey to all the members of the editorial board to see what areas might interest them for active participation. At this time we are going to start re-organizing the editorial board based on participation and activities, removing people who have not participated in seeking to add new members interested in participating in the activities of CTSNet.

Dr. Verdi DiSesa came up with an additional concept of a repository of slides and graphs for presentations to be created as part of the portal. This will provide a unique collection of resources from various journal sources, personal contributions, etc., for people looking for information for presentations online. Dr. DiSesa will be leading this up.

In general the portal itself is almost ready for prime time, the plan is to demonstrate it to the general Editorial Board at the meeting in Washington on May 5, 2007 and hopefully go live shortly thereafter.

Dr. Silvestry has completed the Table of Contents for the Clinical Algorithms and will have a clinical algorithms example for presentation during the meeting on May 5 and this will also go live.

The thing that is encouraging to me, as the editor, is the momentum that we are gaining.

Attendees:
Ali Khoynezhad
Edward Savage
Eric Okum
Francis Ferdinand
Joel Haddock
Michael Banbury
Ray Everngam
Scott Silvestry

Reviewed was the Cardiac Portal located at: http://staging.ctsnet.org/sections/cardiac

Portal Concepts Discussed:

Joel Haddock and Ray Everngam to develop
1. Making the content area summary box more prominent
2. The expansion of the webpage; broader, to be full screen

Clinical Out Rhythms:

Dr. Scott Silvestry
1. Will submit a table of contents for posting, a first example and instructions for submissions

The concept of establishing an FTP mechanism for submissions was discussed; as was the revision of instructions for submissions of content, that were emailed to Ray Everngam and Carol Blasberg earlier today by Dr. Savage.

Diagnostic and Pathologic Images:

Some videos were demonstrated and concepts of how to contribute.

Hallway Conversations:

Concepts were discussed, with further discussion of the topic to be included; the Innovations Center including specifically Endoluminal Technology headed by Dr. Khoynezhad.

Open Discussion:

Eventually links will be established that are more appropriate than the current links we see right now on this mock up.

Dr. Silvestry suggested that we establish links to the various sites on the STS and ATS sites as resources for young people who are looking to possibly become involved in Cardiothoracic Surgery.

An updated gantt chart of the progress will be sent out within the next few weeks.

Next Conference Call: April 19, 2007
Time: 5:00pm CST

For all who seek to submit content we are looking for simple content in the form of angiographic and echo videos, x-rays and pictures demonstrating disease processes and surgical issues. I pointed out how easy this was to do having shown a video that I created in less than half an hour, essentially taking a clip from an echocardiogram from my desktop, masking the name and then adding audio using a program called Video Edit Magic. In addition I demonstrated images that I had taken in the operating room and how I had dictated a description for my assistant to put in a word file and transmitted these to the webmasters at CTSNet for posting.

The other thing that we hope to do with the site is make it much more searchable for content based on topic and name of contributor. Please keep your eye open for these changes coming within the next two months.

Please comment by clicking the link below.