Cardiovascular ICU Advanced Registered Physician Assistant

The Center for Cardiovascular Health in collaboration with the Critical Care Organization at Virginia Mason Franciscan Health is actively recruiting for Cardiovascular Intensive Care Advanced Practice Providers to serve in our new Cardiovascular Intensive Care Unit (CVICU) at Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle, WA. The CVICU will be a 24/7 unit and service coverage. The primary responsibility of the CVICU APP is to provide advanced medical, pre-procedural and post-procedural clinical care to patients who are critically ill with critical cardiac conditions. This role combines clinical expertise, assessment, diagnosis, treatment, and collaboration with multiple healthcare teams to ensure the highest quality of patient care.

Team Details
Across the entire VMFH system, the Center for Cardiovascular Health at VMFH encompasses close to 200 providers, including interventional cardiologists, electrophysiologists, advanced heart failure specialists, cardiac imaging specialists, vascular surgeons, thoracic surgeons, cardiac surgeons and cardiac anesthesiologists. At VMMC, our programs have achieved significant recognition within the region and nationally for our quality and outcomes. We are a high volume program performing annually over 400 open heart surgeries, 400 PCIs, 500 percutaneous structural interventions and 400 ablations. VMMC has been ranked as one of the top 50 Heart & Vascular programs in the nation by 2023 US News & World Report.

Our Critical Care Organization is also much-renowned, with the Critical Care Team contributing heavily to VMMC having been named one of America’s 50 Best Hospitals by Healthgrades and Leapfrog’s “Hospital of the Decade”. The VMMC CCU cares for over 1500 critically ill patients per year in a closed collaborative model for ECMO, medical, structural heart and heart failure patients and in a consultative model for cardiac surgical patients. In addition, VMMC serves as the tertiary and quaternary cardiac referral center for the VMFH system. Virginia Mason provides critical care in a state-of-the-art, 28-bed unit that opened in September 2014. There is a planned expansion in the next few years. We are looking for experienced APPS who thrive in a highly collaborative environment and have a passion for innovations in advanced cardiac care.

In this position you will play a critical role in the comprehensive care and management of cardiac patients within our CVICU. Key Responsibilities include:

• Conduct thorough physical assessments and obtain detailed medical histories to evaluate patients' cardiac conditions and overall health status.
• Formulate accurate diagnoses, perform appropriate procedures, create individualized treatment plans, and prescribe appropriate medications or treatments to manage cardiac conditions.
• Provide and coordinate clinical care for CVICU patients through established protocols and guidelines. You will be supervised by the CVICU intensivist team and the advanced heart failure cardiologist team. You will work closely with our advanced heart failure cardiologists, cardiothoracic anesthesiologists, and cardiac surgeons. You will be a member of the primary CVICU team, but collaboration with all services is essential.
• Monitor and manage critically ill cardiac patients, which may include those requiring ECMO or recovering from acute cardiac events, heart failure exacerbations, cardiac surgery, and other complex cardiac interventions. This also includes management of acute cardiac and respiratory decompensation, including rapid response and code events. Initiate emergency interventions in an effort to stabilize the patient until physician support arrives.
• Manage mechanical circulatory support devices, including ECMO, temporary left ventricular and right ventricular assist devices (Impella), intra-aortic balloon pumps, and durable left ventricular assist devices (LVAD), through collaborative work with advanced heart failure cardiologists, CVICU intensivists, cardiac surgeons, and ECMO specialists.
• Perform procedures when indicated based on the applicant's expertise, including placement of central venous catheters and pulmonary arterial catheters; arterial line placement, rewiring, and removal; intra-aortic balloon pump (IABP) removal with supervision; placement of nasogastric or other nasal or oral enteral feeding tubes; management of peripherally inserted central catheters (PICC); peripheral intravenous catheter placement (PIV); ECG interpretation including atrial right heart ECG; defibrillation and cardioversion; temporary pacemaker wire removal, clipping, and programming; management of transcutaneous pacemakers.
• Develop patient care pathways, protocols, and guidelines for the management of specific problems in conjunction with physicians and other members of the health care te