Following its 2012 survey of the barriers that prevent patients in Europe from having access to transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI), BIBA MedTech has launched a new survey to gain insight into the barriers that stop patients outside of Europe from having this procedure. The 2012 survey found that, in 2011, 50% of eligible TAVI candidates in Europe did not receive the therapy.
In 2012, BIBA MedTech launched the semi-structured survey among 100 TAVI centres from eight European countries to better understand if TAVI was offered to all inoperable patients with severe aortic stenosis (TAVI is now seen as the gold standard for this group) or whether clinical and non-clinical factors were hampering a wider adoption of the technology. A spokesman for BIBA MedTech says: “We knew that, in Europe, not all inoperable patients had access to TAVI. What we did not know was the exact percentage of the potential TAVI population who were unable to access the therapy, and why they were not able to access it.”
The survey suggested that hospital capacity and budget constraints were some of the key reasons why nearly half of all eligible TAVI candidates were not undergoing the procedure. In 2012, the findings from the survey were presented at the Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics (TCT) meeting and were also published in the Journal of American College of Cardiology.
BIBA MedTech has now decided to launch a similar survey outside of Europe, in a group of countries in which the rate of TAVI adoption is similarly diverse as it is in Europe. If you are interested in taking part in the new survey, please contact project coordinator Dario Remigi ([email protected]).
