Dear NESIR Colleagues,

After a brief hiatus, I would like to get back in touch with you to discuss where we are and what are the plans for the remainder of the 2014 season.

As you know, in December Doug Huynh delivered a great lecture on IR economics and how to overcome (or at least be better prepared) for the changes in the way we deliver health care in this country. It was a quite interesting topic and the audience was really engaged.

For January, we had the honor of hosting one of the giants in our field, Dr. Barry Katzen. He gave us a great overview on the current status of Endovascular Aortic Repair and may have convinced some of us to take a second look at the field that has been moving away from IR over the past few years.

As always, we had great cases presented by our fellows during both meetings.

Moving forward, for our next meeting in February our invited speaker is Dr. Chieh-Min Fan from the Brigham and Women's Hospital. Dr. Fan is an expert on varicose vein ablation and will be lecturing on "Saphenous Vein Ablation: an Update".

Lastly, I am glad to report that a combination of fundraising efforts led by Dr. Ganguli with the restructuring of our expenses has left us in a stable financial status at this point of the year. However, we are still missing contributions from some of the major players in the industry so I encourage you to take a look at the list of grantors in our website and ask your local representative for their support.

I hope to see you all on February 3rd.

Best,

Herlen Alencar, MD
President, NESIR