Another victory for the heart valve business?

For companies in the world of transcatheter aortic valve replacement, a non-surgical means of rescuing damaged hearts, the path to clinical relevance has been long and occasionally painful. But a proposed new Medicare rule could make the procedure a more common alternative to open-heart surgery, a potential boon for the likes of Edwards Lifesciences and Medtronic.

As STAT’s Matthew Herper reports, CMS put out a proposal that would rescind a requirement that hospitals do a certain number of surgical valve replacements before they can be reimbursed for TAVR procedures. The new rule, if implemented, could expand the number of patients who get new valves without having their chests cracked open. But there is also some risk, because CMS is going to require that centers do more procedures in order to keep doing them.

The proposal comes weeks after a pair of large studies showed that TAVR provided better outcomes than surgery.

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