The Fellowship Training Program in Cardiovascular Disease, offered by the Leon H. Charney Division of Cardiology, provides comprehensive service rotations through a wide array of clinical venues. These include coronary care units (CCUs), cardiac acute care services, cardiology consult services, heart failure services, and cardiology continuity clinics.

Bellevue Coronary Care Unit

The NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue CCU is a signature rotation within our fellowship program that allows trainees to supervise medical house staff caring for patients with a wide array of acute and often life-threatening cardiovascular diseases. Coordinating care among multiple consultants, fellows treat patients with cardiac arrhythmias, chest pain, and acute coronary syndromes, acute and decompensated advanced chronic heart failure, syncope, valvular heart disease, pericarditis, myocarditis, endocarditis, and cardiomyopathy. Training during this rotation includes combined clinical work and teaching rounds with two faculty members with complementary expertise.

Bellevue is the central referral site for all advanced interventional and electrophysiology procedures from the 17 hospitals of the NYC Health + Hospitals Corporation. The Bellevue CCU provides a consistently exciting challenge and a remarkable educational experience.

Bellevue Cardiology Consult Service

The Bellevue Cardiology Consult Service provides fellows with the opportunity to evaluate and assume consultative responsibility for approximately five newly referred patients each day. Trainees confront the entire spectrum of cardiovascular illness at all stages of disease progression. The monthly rotations through this service, repeated throughout the program, are a crucial part of training and play a central role in the development of differential diagnostic and patient management skills. Fellows also have the opportunity to teach rotating medical house staff and medical students at this venue.

Faculty supervisors provide three to four hours of instructional rounds daily. William R. Slater, MD, director of the Cardiology Consult Service, is a premier educator whose efforts have been recognized repeatedly with “great teacher” awards from the Leon H. Charney Division of Cardiology, the Department of Medicine, and the greater university community.

Kimmel Pavilion Cardiac Acute Care Service

The Cardiac Acute Care Service at NYU Langone’s Kimmel Pavilion provides fellows with experience in the daily inpatient management of a large cohort of patients of diverse socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, equally diverse in diagnoses. Trainees evaluate patients and guide the treatment provided by a team of dedicated internal medicine residents. Under the supervision of two cardiology faculty, fellows conduct daily combined work and teaching rounds and teach the resident house staff through a combination of rounding, review of clinical laboratory test results, and presentation of prepared didactic sessions.

Fellows participate in interdisciplinary patient safety and quality rounds. Trainees also ensure documentation of all core measures required for optimal care of patients with acute coronary syndromes and heart failure and for patients requiring amplification of preventive measures. Through these experiences, fellows become well versed in the application of evidence-based cardiovascular care.

Kimmel Pavilion Coronary Care Unit

The Kimmel Pavilion CCU rotation allows fellows to care for patients with an array of acute and often life-threatening cardiovascular diseases. Fellows collaborate with advanced practice providers and nurse practitioners specifically trained in cardiac intensive care and lead combined clinical work and teaching rounds supervised by faculty members who are expert in cardiac intensive care, advanced heart failure, and shock. The team treats patients with cardiac arrhythmias, chest pain and acute coronary syndromes, acute and decompensated advanced chronic heart failure, syncope, valvular heart disease, pericarditis, myocarditis, endocarditis, and cardiomyopathy. Hemodynamic monitoring, ventricular support devices, and mechanical ventilation comprise some of the educational and procedural objectives undertaken at this venue.

VA NY Harbor Healthcare System Coronary Care Unit and Consult Service

This advanced combined clinical rotation assigns responsibility to second-year fellows for the care of critically ill patients in the VA NY Harbor Healthcare System CCU and its medical intensive care unit, as well as cardiology consultation throughout the clinical site, which fields interventional cardiology referrals from a large swath of the greater New York area. Fellows, under the direct supervision of our experienced faculty, provide critical care for our ever-growing and aging population of veterans. Our fellows consider this intensive learning experience to be an important step in deepening their knowledge base and translating their training into effective, high-quality care.

Bellevue and NYU Langone Heart Failure Service

The heart failure service rotations are supervised by our advanced heart failure and transplant program faculty. This clinical experience at both Bellevue and NYU Langone encompasses consultative responsibilities for cases involving a broad array of heart failure etiologies, presentations, and degrees of worsening heart failure.

This service focuses its educational effort on myocardial and circulatory pathophysiology and complex hemodynamics. An important objective of this rotation is familiarity with state-of-the-art implantable therapeutic and diagnostic devices. The core of the service’s responsibilities is coordination of care with our echocardiographers, electrophysiologists, interventional cardiologists, other imaging specialists, and cardiothoracic surgeons. The Heart Failure Service has attained national prominence as a result of outstanding outcomes, rapid access to transplantation services, and the remarkable social support afforded its patients. In the second or third year of the fellowship, direct experience with cardiac transplant patients is incorporated into the educational program.

Bellevue Adult Cardiology and VA NY Harbor Healthcare Continuity Clinics

Fellows train at the John Wyckoff Adult Cardiology Clinic at Bellevue, the first cardiology clinic in the United States, one afternoon each week to care for outpatients with a wide array of cardiovascular disease. Satellite clinics for patients with chronic heart failure and those with pacemakers and defibrillators are also a part of this program. Trainees provide management for a personal roster of patients, followed for the duration of the fellowship. This continuity clinic affords exceptional experience in the longitudinal care of cardiac patients of diverse ethnicities, socioeconomic backgrounds, and diagnoses. A group of fellows split their longitudinal outpatient experience between Bellevue and the VA NY Harbor Healthcare Clinic, where similar clinical and demographic characteristics are encountered in a patient cohort of predominantly male veterans.