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Thomas Schlöglhofer receives Helmut Reul Young Investigator Award

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(Vienna, 16 November 2016) Thomas Schlöglhofer from the Center for Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering and the Division of Cardiac Surgery at the Medical University of Vienna was presented with the Helmut Reul Young Investigator Award at the 24th Congress of the International Society for Rotary Blood Pumps (ISRBP/ISMCS) held in Mito (Japan).

The Helmut Reul Young Investigator Award is conferred every year by the ISRBP in commemoration of Helmut Reul, a pioneer in the field of mechanical cardiac support and cardiovascular prostheses, who died in 2004. This year, the award was presented to Thomas Schlöglhofer at the ISRBP annual conference for his paper "A standardized telephone intervention algorithm improves significantly the survival of ventricular assist device outpatients" (co-authors: J. Horvat, Z. Hartner, G. Necid, J. Riebandt, F. Moscato, D. Wiedemann, D. Zimpfer and H. Schima).

 

 

This paper showed that close monitoring of patients with mechanical cardiac support systems is crucial to their long-term survival. By introducing a regular, standardised telephone intervention for monitoring pump parameters and various clinical parameters such as blood pressure and anticoagulation targets, the one-year mortality of the patients living at home was halved and, at the same time, the average length of hospital stay required for inpatient procedures was reduced by one third.

About Thomas Schlöglhofer
Thomas Schlöglhofer (born in Vienna in 1985) is a biomedical engineer at the Center for Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering and VAD coordinator at the Medical University of Vienna's Division of Cardiac Surgery. He gained his Bachelor of Science in Engineering at the Technical University of Vienna in 2008. Together with working group leader Heinrich Schima and his colleagues from the Ludwig Boltzmann cluster for cardiovascular research, Thomas Schlöglhofer is primarily concerned with optimising mechanical cardiac support systems in terms of their the user-friendliness and operating safety. His additional focus is the implementation of algorithms to improve the care of VAD outpatients. This year, Schlöglhofer  is also President of the International Consortium of Circulatory Assist Clinicians.