Articles & Press Releases

The SVS Appointments Committee has made great efforts to be more transparent, diverse and equitable in recent years—a process its chair and members plan to continue.

Among the many projects of the SVS Coding and Reimbursement Committee, advocating appropriate coverage for vascular services continues to be a major focus. In 2021, the committee, led by chair Sunita Srivastava, MD, will continue to increase its coverage initiatives, working with government and private payers.

A new SVS Branding Toolkit is the culmination of hard work over the past two years by the Public and Professional Outreach (PPO) Committee, according to campaign spearhead and committee chair Joseph L. Mills, MD. And there’s more to come for 2021.

The SVS VA Vascular Surgeons Committee is looking ahead this year to reclaim procedural volume at Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) facilities—ravaged by COVID-19—and to facilitate construction of hybrid suites.

The inaugural cohort of the Society for Vascular Surgery (SVS) Leadership Development Program had to show some resilience early.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) has delivered a blow to vascular surgery in the form of a 7% cut in total payment for the services it provides. The cuts are included in the agency’s final rule for Medicare payments under the Physician Fee Schedule (PFS), and were slated to take effect Jan.1, 2021. 

For aspiring vascular trainees, interview season is a time of great stress as well as opportunity. Graduating medical students and residents prepare the pitches of a lifetime.

It was a central plank of the presidential agenda set out by immediate past president Kim Hodgson, MD. And now the SVS Appropriateness Committee has targeted further development of the Society’s first set of Appropriate Use Criteria guidelines.

The newly formed Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Committee plans to implement the recommendations from the DEI Task Force.

As part of the Education Council (see related story, below), the Education Committee is breaking new ground in 2021.

The Policy and Advocacy Council is composed of the leaders of the Coding and Reimbursement, Government Relations, PAC, Quality and Performance Measures, and VA Vascular Surgeons committees.

The SVS Political Action Steering Committee (PAC) looks to protect your future and hopes.

Since its inception, the Community Practice Committee has been a valuable resource for surgeons working in settings that serve local communities.

The Basic and Translational Research Committee (BTRC) is the new name of the former Research and Education Committee.

Applications are due early in 2021 for a number of Society for Vascular Surgery (SVS) and SVS Foundation awards, honors and grants.

Have you paid your 2021 Society for Vascular Surgery dues? If you haven’t, you’re missing access to all of the latest research in the Journal of Vascular Surgery publications.

A grant from the SVS Foundation has helped amputees in the Fresno, Calif. area get up and walking more quickly than is typical.

The below are the references for the article about research opportunities within the Department of Veterans Affairs, which ran in the December 2020 Specialist. 

The American Medical Association's Board of Trustees has named Society for Vascular Surgery (SVS) longtime coding expert and member Robert M. Zwolak, MD, as the AMA alternative representative to the organization’s RVS Update Committee (RUC), and alternative vice chair.

The Society for Vascular Surgery would like to welcome the popular Audible Bleeding podcast into its communications family.

During the virtual annual meeting of the New England Society for Vascular Surgery (NESVS), outgoing president Marc L. Schermerhorn, MD, called for the NESVS to follow the lead of the Society for Vascular Surgery (SVS) by creating a diversity task force.

The last nine months took away much. The Vascular Annual Meeting (VAM) was canceled. The Vascular Research Initiatives Conference (VRIC) suffered a similar fate—its content latterly resuscitated in virtual form last month. The traditional Society for Vascular Surgery (SVS) presidential handover, too, followed an unorthodox route.

Humans are social animals, and, over time, they have found that their best times are spent in groups. We have just celebrated Thanksgiving, spending time with our most important group, our family, reflecting on our present life situation and giving thanks. And more holidays are to come.

Psychologists place great emphasis on the object permanence milestone, but object impermanence is the more brutal lesson. My experience is now familiar and commonplace. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have lost a parent during the pandemic. Our usual methods of closure have been stripped from us. People are dying in isolation, and the ones they leave behind must often grieve alone. Our failure to control the pandemic has had profound psychological consequences beyond the endless death toll. Our country has risen to similar challenges before, and I believe it will again if we learn from the mistakes we made this year. To accomplish this, we must create a complete account of the costs we have endured.