What is the Heart Team approach?
The Heart Team is a multidisciplinary group of specialists — including cardiac surgeons, interventional cardiologists, imaging specialists, and anesthesiologists — who collaboratively evaluate complex cardiac cases and recommend treatment. The Heart Team approach is a Class I recommendation (highest level) in the 2020 ACC/AHA guidelines for valvular heart disease and is standard at major cardiac surgery centers.
The complete answer.
The Heart Team approach arose from the recognition that treatment decisions for conditions like aortic stenosis (TAVR vs SAVR) and coronary artery disease (CABG vs PCI) benefit from multiple perspectives. When a surgeon and a cardiologist independently evaluate a patient, the recommendation may differ — and both perspectives are valuable. The SYNTAX trial demonstrated that Heart Team decisions led to better outcomes than individual physician decisions. WhiteGloveMD builds on this model by providing a dual-physician Heart Team review with triple risk-model scoring (STS, EuroSCORE II, AATS) by a cardiac surgeon and a cardiologist.
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