Meet Dr. Matthew Summers, as he discusses his areas of focus, his path to medicine, his approach to patient care, and how the field of Interventional Cardiology is evolving.
My name is Matthew Summers. I'm an interventional cardiologist at Centa. Um currently the program director of Structural Heart and the core of the Centa Heart valve Center. So I'm a structural heart interventional cardiologist and a complex coronary interventional cardiologist. So the patients I take care of have complex heart valve problems that need minimally invasive repairs or replacements and also patients that have complex coronary blockages that require additional techniques and additional therapies to get them through that procedure. I grew up in Central Virginia. Um I came from a family that, that didn't have any uh medical professionals and it's uh but uh quickly in college uh found uh an interest in science and particularly in research. And that led to me working with um an ND phd at the National Cancer Institute and ultimately wanting to uh shift towards patient care rather than bench research. Um Initially, I was planning on doing international health or cancer biology um and being an oncologist. Um but uh I was a medical student at Mayo Clinic and I had the opportunity to work with several um interventional cardiologists doing what I do now and uh developed a love and passion for, for structural heart and for cardiology. So Sana has, has uh had a long history of uh success in being at the forefront within intru heart. Um It's well known as, as one of the, the places that can handle and tackle complex heart valve issues. And so uh when I was finishing my training at Cleveland Clinic, I was looking for a place uh that um I could use the things that I learned how to do. Um And particularly if it was closer to home, that was gonna be a positive. And Sana is uh you know, like I said, for the past 15 years, been one of the leaders in structural heart, um not just in complexity but in patient volumes and taking care of a lot of different patients. Um And so that was a big draw is being able to come back close to home and do the things that I spent so much time training to do uh for the people in the community that I grew up in. So, so I did medical school at the mayo clinic. And the first thing they, they ingrained in you is that the needs of the patient come first. Um It's part of your white coat ceremony. It's part of the entire process when you, when you come in as a medical student there. And that's not a unique philosophy, but it's something that's deeply ingrained. Uh any from the first day of medical school there. Um And so the patient focus needs to be the primary thing in all of our um responsibilities as health care providers. So I, I try to stay as true to that as possible. And um regardless of how busy things are, how complex procedures are, how, how many things you have to do in a day that the patient is, is at the center of all that and the only really the only individual that matters in the equation. Sure. So, so this field is, is relatively new for the past 10 to 15 years. Uh We've had technology that allows us to do valve replacements and valve repairs uh without open heart surgery without uh any incisions or cutting. Um And so the entire field is relatively new. The, the the procedure ta or trans aortic valve replacement is, is the one that's taken the forefront. Um At least what people people understand and have heard of that therapy involves replacing the aortic valve with catheters and wires through a pinhole at the top of the leg. Um That therapy is being uh uh it's transitioning to other valve therapies including mitral valve replacements. We also have uh MitraClip a way to repair the mitral valves. And so the field as a whole is now that we've had successes in the aortic valve space. We've been translating that success into technology and new therapies for all the other valves. And so we have an explosion of new technology that allows us to treat patients that we previously weren't able to treat either because they had high surgical risk or weren't candidates for open heart surgery. Otherwise, we're now able to help a lot of these people that didn't have any other options. Um And in a lot of cases, didn't have any other options but hospice or, or significant heart failure. And so, uh the field as a whole is, is on the forefront of medicine and involves a lot of new device, therapies that have demonstrated themselves to be incredibly successful in the patient population that we have here that has and previously had an unmet need.
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