Four out of five people don't know that they have cardiovascular disease until they end up in the emergency room. MedAxiom HeartTalk host Melanie Lawson speaks with Rahul Sharma, MBBS, FRACP, the director of structural interventions at Stanford Healthcare and the senior scientific advisor for egnite, about why structural heart patients experience an unreasonable wait time before treatment and how technology can be used to identify and treat patients before it's too late.

Guest Bio:

Rahul P. Sharma, MBBS, FRACP is the director of Structural Interventions at Stanford Healthcare, associate director of the Cardiac Catheterization Laboratory and clinical associate professor of Medicine at Stanford University.
Dr. Sharma graduated from Monash University and completed his medicine and cardiology training at the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, Australia. He completed an advanced interventional and structural fellowship at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California in 2015 before joining Cedars Sinai as clinical faculty, director of the Structural Imaging Core Laboratory and associate director of Interventional Cardiology Research until 2019, before joining Stanford Healthcare.

Dr. Sharma is an interventional cardiologist with specialized clinical and research interests in structural heart disease, particularly transcatheter valve therapy. He has a large volume of expertise in transcatheter aortic, mitral and tricuspid replacement, percutaneous mitral valve repair, left atrial appendage occlusion, patent foramen ovale/atrial septal defect/ventricular septal defect closure, alcohol septal ablation and cerebral protection. He also has expertise in CT imaging for structural heart disease. He is a clinical investigator in ongoing national multi-center research studies and clinical trials and has co-authored numerous peer reviewed, scientific articles and book chapters. Dr. Sharma also serves as a national and international clinical proctor for transcatheter aortic and mitral valve implantation and percutaneous mitral valve repair and speaks regularly at major national and international cardiology meetings.