 Hi, I'm Maya Pomeroy. Welcome to the Heartbeat. Dr. Joseph Rogers became Texas Heart Institute's president and CEO in the spring of 2021 and is already implementing critical initiatives to accelerate innovation and unite the institute around this mission to deliver the future of cardiovascular health and care. Hello Dr. Rogers. Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for having me. We'd like to get to know you a little bit better. What got you inspired to get into medicine? I mean you could probably have done anything that you wanted to do in your entire life. I actually started my formative years thinking that I would be an educator and I was particularly interested in instrumental and vocal music and so I had an opportunity to explore a lot of different liberal arts topics as I was growing up and it really wasn't until I got to college that I realized that I had a passion for science and interestingly it was in chemistry and I enjoyed chemistry immensely and I thought gosh I think I can use this in a way that might allow me to help people and that's sort of how I evolved into thinking about a career in medicine so it wasn't actually until I went to college that I really had made a commitment to being a physician. While respected across the Texas Medical Center and far beyond, Dr. Rogers is committed to collaborating with THI's long-standing partners and affiliates. He shares his vision for THI as it enters its 60th year since the founding by world-renowned cardiovascular surgeon Dr. Denton Cooley. I think THI was a remarkable opportunity and a very unique opportunity in the United States. The board had a great vision for what they wanted THI to become. They wanted to re-establish the Texas Heart Institute on a national and international stage as a leader in cardiovascular medicine and they're able to couple that with the resources to actually make that happen. That's an unusual combination, surprisingly, but an unusual combination and so it was really that grand vision to build something special, to build a legacy, to build upon what's already been done here over the last 60 years. Very exciting. It's an amazing opportunity to take what Dr. Cooley and Dr. Willerson and all of their colleagues have built over the last 60 years and say, what can we do next? What is the next great thing that the Texas Heart Institute can do? So what is that? It's a great question. I think that there's a number of things that the Texas Heart Institute can do in the next decade or two that are really going to distinguish us from other cardiovascular programs worldwide. I think a lot of that is focused on quality. When Dr. Cooley started the Texas Heart Institute in the early 1960s, the things that he was doing in the operating room were remarkably unique. You couldn't go anywhere else in the world and get that kind of care. As Dr. Cooley and his colleagues have trained heart surgeons across the world, you can go almost anywhere now and have heart surgery or you can go have a heart cath or you can go get an echocardiogram. The real question for the Texas Heart Institute is, how can we provide that clinical care better than anyone else in the world? Oftentimes when new leaders come into an organization, they will initially recraft the mission statement, reimagine what the vision is, or think about internal values. Dr. Rogers took it a step further. I looked at the mission and the vision statements for the Heart Institute and they needed to be updated. They could be more contemporary and the thing I'm most proud of in the Heart Institute is that we engaged a variety of different stakeholders. We brought people together and said, okay, let's recraft these, let's make them contemporary and let's make sure that we have words that are meaningful to the people that work here and meaningful to the people who are customers. The Texas Heart Institute's new vision is to forge a better future for those with cardiovascular disease through an unwavering commitment to global leadership in patient care, pioneering innovation and unparalleled training. Dr. Rogers believes harnessing Dr. Cooley's legacy will propel THI into the future. I keep telling our colleagues that it's great to look back over the last 60 years and say, wow, what happened at the Texas Heart Institute has been amazing. I want people to look back and go, the 2020s at the Texas Heart Institute were absolutely amazing. THI's new mission is forward thinking and focuses on the future. Preventative cardiology is the ultimate goal, not just finding new ways to treat people who already have cardiovascular disease. I'm very, very proud of our team in thinking about our values and what matters to us. And we talk about excellence. We emphasize diversity. We talk about inclusion. And we talk about safety. And I think these are all very important concepts for the Heart Institute as we move forward. And we've already gone back and leaned on those values that we've all agreed to as we've made decisions. We look forward to seeing you next time on the Heart Beat. I'm Maya Pomeroy.