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Community Heart and Vascular Hospital Electrophysiology Program, Community Health Network
Dr. Krishna Malineni is spreading the good word—and doing the important work—of improvements in the treatment of atrial fibrillation, or irregular heartbeats.
Malineni is the medical director for Community Heart and Vascular Hospital’s electrophysiology program, which has adopted a new technique known as pulse field ablation that uses an electrical current instead of hot or cold thermal energy to treat heart arrhythmia.
This procedure, which involves applying current at a rapid rate, affects heart tissue without affecting surrounding tissues. Malineni said pulse field ablation is faster, more effective and safer with a lower risk of complications. It has enabled Community to treat patients that doctors were hesitant to treat in the past because patients are able to tolerate the procedure better than past techniques and recover faster.
“There’s been great excitement, and we feel like we can do something safer for our patients and be more effective and be able to deliver this treatment for more patients,” he said. “Atrial fibrillation is a growing problem in [the] United States. It is something that involves a lot of health care utilization. So, if there was something more effective, we wanted to be on the front line.”
Community Heart and Vascular Hospital began offering pulse field ablation last February, when the FDA approved it, which made the hospital an early adopter.
Malineni said more than 10 million people in the United States are estimated to be living with atrial fibrillation, and current projections say that number will increase to 30 million because of the aging population and the obesity epidemic. Malineni and his team of six doctors have now treated more than 700 patients and are among the 10 busiest sites in the country for pulse field ablation.
Pulse field ablation has been researched for the last 10 years and was tested in Europe for almost three years before it got FDA approval in the United States, Malineni said.
“Now, basically, the whole way we treat a-fib has changed,” he said, “meaning that pretty much every site in the United States now is looking at adopting and using this technology to treat atrial fibrillation.”
Malineni has been an electrophysiologist for 19 years. He trained at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago for general cardiology and at Aurora
St. Luke’s Medical Center in Milwaukee, one of the largest centers for electrophysiology. After practicing in the Chicago area for about four years, he was recruited by Community to develop its electrophysiology program.
“We call ourselves ‘electricians for the heart,’” he said. “There has been a lot of development of technology over the years. We also do pacemakers and defibrillators, but ablation is a big part of what we do day in and day out to help patients who suffer with electrical problems of their heart.”
Now, Malineni and his team are training other physicians around the country and the world. On the day he was interviewed for this story, Malineni had just returned from teaching the technique to doctors in Japan.•
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