At many of these facilities, we are the primary or sole providers of EP services. Together, we conduct more than 5,000 procedures each year, ranging from standard diagnostic studies to complex procedures, involving catheter and intraoperative mapping. We also participate regularly in device and drug clinical trials and operate our own, independent animal-research laboratory in an academic environment.

Like our colleagues around the world, we are pleased to be introducing life-saving and life-altering EP techniques to so many thousands of patients each year, especially in previously un- and under-served communities. However, this level of outreach expansion is not without its difficulties. Electrophysiology is a relatively new discipline, with a rapidly growing knowledge base and rapidly evolving procedural tools. As a result, electrophysiologists who are usually independent of the facilities at which they practice do not always have access to the most efficient tools; this is especially true of the EP-monitoring systems on which we rely.

For these reasons, our group decided several years ago to do all we could to ensure standardization of these systems from facility to facility. In this article, I will describe why this is so important and how we went about choosing both a system and a vendor who could meet our needs today and for the future.