ACC 2023 is officially a wrap. We hope you had a blast if you made it, and had a great weekend if you stayed home. We also hope you enjoy our recap of cardiology’s biggest event in three years. Here’s Cardiac Wire’s top eight takeaways from ACC 2023:
- Crowds & Conversations – Helped by some NOLA mojo and post-COVID vibes, ACC’s attendance (estimated by some at 20k) and overall energy surpassed most expectations.
- Chronic Trends – Starting at the keynote and continuing throughout the conference, the rising prevalence of cardiovascular disease and major CVD risk factors dominated conversations.
- The Guidelines Gap – If you had “treat to guidelines” on your ACC bingo card you’d be in a good spot, because the exhibit hall and sessions were full of conversations about the challenges achieving guidelines adherence.
- The Diagnosis Gap – The same conversations often revealed massive estimates of how many more people would have qualified for those guidelines if they weren’t living undiagnosed.
- Treatment Expansion – The continued expansion of available preventative treatments (plus new indications added to existing treatments) remains a major theme, even if many of these treatments were the focus of the fiercest debates.
- Consumer Confidence – Healthcare insiders aren’t always quick to endorse technologies from outside of their domains, but ACC revealed a surprising acceptance of consumer products (e.g. the Apple Watch) and the overall benefits of home-based monitoring and care.
- AI at ACC – Artificial intelligence played a much greater role at this year’s ACC, with what seemed like far more AI studies and twice as many AI vendors and AI applications in the exhibit hall.
- Cardiologists in Demand – If you’re wondering about the state of cardiologist staffing levels, one look at all the health system and staffing company booths at ACC would have told you everything you need to know.
The Takeaway
Cardiology faces plenty of challenges, but it’s populated by some of the smartest and most passionate people in medicine who are working hard to solve those challenges (even if they don’t always agree on the solutions). Hats off to the ACC team for getting all those smart people together to push those solutions forward.
