Cleveland, OH - Dr Joseph Sabik is the new chair of thoracic and cardiovascular surgery for the Cleveland Clinic's new Heart and Vascular Institute; Sabik was formerly the director of the department of thoracic and cardiovascular surgery's residency training program at the Cleveland Clinic.

Dr Joseph Sabik (Source: Cleveland Clinic)

Sabik officially transitioned into his new post in April and calls it "the perfect job."

"I look at this as fostering a new era of heart surgery, and this gives me the opportunity to lead and to bring us there. I suppose when most people become chairman there's one of two reasons: either they come in to shake things up, or they continue to move a good group forward and I'm fortunate enough to be in the latter group," he told heartwire.

Sabik emphasized that his appointment comes just as the Cleveland Clinic's new Heart and Vascular Institute begins to open its doors to patients; the lobby, he said, just opened today. Cardiovascular and thoracic surgery is expected to make the move to the new space in mid-October, allowing even greater collaboration between disciplines, Sabik said. "A lot of what we'll be doing is continuing our collaboration with our cardiology and vascular colleagues and developing new procedures that really cross boundaries," Sabik explained. "The most exciting thing in this new job is working in this institutional structure with leaders in cardiology and leaders in vascular surgery, as opposed to thinking of a patient as either a surgical patient, a medical patient, or a percutaneous patient." There will be two endovascular suites in the new institute that will permit hybrid surgical/endovascular procedures, Sabik noted.

Dr Ravi Nair (Source: Cleveland Clinic)

The clinic also recently announced that Dr Ravi Nair is the new associate director of Sones Cardiac Catheterization Laboratories for the Heart and Vascular Institute. Nair was previously the director of the cardiac catheterization lab at University Hospitals of Cleveland. Nair took up the new post on May 1.

Nair had spent the past two decades at the University Hospitals Cleveland; speaking with heartwire, he called the switch to the Cleveland Clinic "more than a lateral move."

"I'm getting the opportunity to work with very skilled, thoughtful, premier interventional cardiologists. This is a unique place where a group of people with specialized skills all work together, with cutting-edge technologies, many of which are not available to a lot of people in other parts of the country. Finally, this is one of the premier cardiology programs in the country, and we're moving into this state-of-the-art heart hospital. So this was a really unique opportunity and hard to pass up."