What It Takes to Move Atrial Fibrillation Practice to the Outpatient Setting

Interview With Suneet Mittal, MD

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In this interview from Western AF 2024, we speak with Suneet Mittal, MD, from the Valley Health System on what it takes to move atrial fibrillation (AF) practice to the outpatient setting.

What can you tell us about your presentation today at Western AF?

What Nassir asked me to speak about this year was on the topic of if we are ready to consider outpatient ablation of AF to be the standard of care. I will take people through the journey and evolution of the procedure, how procedure times have become shorter, and postprocedural care has become shorter. All these things really lend themselves well to an outpatient procedure. We now have data post COVID from many labs about the safety of this procedure. We've also learned where it's not possible to send patients home the same day. Finally, I'm going to explore a little about some of the early data about moving these procedures to an ambulatory surgical center, which has been at the forefront of discussion with many of my colleagues in electrophysiology. 

What are the take-home messages you would like viewers to leave with? 

I think the biggest take-home message is that I'm hoping that everyone has already adopted same-day discharge practices for their patients. If not, this is the time to do it. There are a lot of things, both with shorter procedure times and more rapid ambulation, that lend themselves well to doing it. Post-COVID, I think we've really learned that this is important for a patient satisfier and it can be done safely. The next real issue for us to determine is whether we can extend the observations that we've learned in a hospital setting to an ambulatory surgical care center.

What is your favorite part about Western AF?

I think the best part of Western AF is the engagement with the faculty. The people who come here tend to come here year after year, so it feels like a family. He does a good job of engaging people at the podium as well as through social media like Twitter/X. As a result, I think it leads to a really intimate setting and makes for an engaging discussion. You can see the evolution of the field year after year as you attend this meeting. I consider myself fortunate to have had the opportunity to attend many of these at this point.

The transcripts have been edited for clarity and length.