President’s column By Matthew S. Johnson, MD, FSIR The VIRTEX superhighway
Our destination, of course, is a future where our specialty has the data to prove what we’ve long believed to be true—that IR therapies are first-line solutions that provide a minimally invasive option of care.
I
t’s no secret that I value research. It’s the heart of scientific progress, the cog that keeps medicine going. Research is the vehicle through which
we prove the impossible. Research is what started IR and is what allows us to improve the lives of our patients every day via technology and techniques that were unheard of not that long ago.
Research can be daunting, though. Randomized controlled trials are the gold standard, but they come with their own complexities. They also take several years to complete and are extremely expensive. Randomized controlled trials are crucial to the future of the specialty, but we need other effective avenues of research that are more accessible and affordable.
VIRTEX ticks all those boxes and more.
I think of VIRTEX as a piece of infrastructure. It’s the highway that will take IR to new destinations. It helps us keep moving forward, with signposts to mark our way and track our progress, and it’s available for all of us to use. If we eschew it for a different path, it will take a much longer time to reach our destination.
Our destination, of course, is a future where our specialty has the data to prove what we’ve long believed to be true—that IR therapies are first-line solutions that provide a minimally invasive option of care. In this future, we can use data to create partnerships and collaborations with other specialties. We can engage in evidence-based care and track the efficacy of procedures on
a nationwide scale. VIRTEX will allow us to improve the field every day, simply by recording the work we already do—so why not take part?
But the future I’ve just described isn’t for us physicians. It’s for our patients. The end goal of every data set and research effort is to improve patient care. By combining our collective information, experience and data, VIRTEX will help us standardize how we perform common procedures to maximize the benefit to patients. It will help us create more clinical practice guidelines, which result in better-informed physicians. You can also track intraprocedural complications and benchmark against both your site and other facilities.
The VIRTEX registry is growing quickly. Since launch, VIRTEX has already added more standardized reporting templates, with plans for additional tracking functions. Even as it improves, though, the cost remains the same to make the registry affordable and easy to implement. There is no practice type or setting that cannot work with VIRTEX—private practices, academic hospitals, hospital-based practices, hospital employees, and multispecialty or radiology groups can all benefit from implementing the registry.
All your VIRTEX questions have been answered on the FAQ page at
bit.ly/ virtex_faq. I strongly encourage you to learn more about how you can become part of the research of culture at SIR with VIRTEX. Together, we will build the next wave of IR research.
6 IRQ | FALL 2021
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