Cognitive and decision-making skills in catheter-based cardiovascular interventions

Abstract

For the past nearly four decades, performance of catheter-based cardiovascular interventions has been considered largely inaccessible to formal scrutiny. It has been assumed that interventional knowledge and skills are based on empiricism and can be transferred only tacitly. In addition, over the past decades, the importance of clinical trials based evidence and charms of instrumentation technology have been strongly overemphasized with these factors contributing to the demise of the importance of cognitive skills and decline of technical abilities of the operators, both required for the procedural interventional expertise. In this chapter, the key importance of cognitive skills for interventional expertise has been emphasized. Development of training curricula and clinical practice based on deliberate practice and acquisition of relevant cognitive skills is needed to raise the level of professional standards and to improve the quality of interventional services in the best interest of all stakeholders, of which our patients are the most important.