Designing and Implementing a Heart Team: Institutional Experiences Over the Past 10 Years

The heart team (HT) is a multidisciplinary team that performs a comprehensive review of patients with complex cardiac issues, collaborates on potential treatment options, and provides the patient with treatment recommendations. Despite strong guideline support and HT's ubiquitous presence, data on how to operationally design, implement, and measure the success of an HT remain limited. This, in turn, has led to wide variability in how HT are instituted. This review examines the development and strategy toward operationalizing HT to help identify potential barriers to HT development and growth. The HT itself is the culmination of a complex care process with the goal of adopting an integrated, patient-centric HT approach to treatment decisions in the care of patients with complex coronary artery disease.