Cath Lab Director
Oversees cath lab operations — staffing, case scheduling, equipment selection, sterile workflow, quality outcomes, and interventional physicist coordination. Typically an experienced interventional cardiologist who retains a clinical caseload, or a senior nurse manager with long cath-lab operational experience. Reports to the hospital's cardiology or cardiovascular service-line leadership; works closely with interventional radiologists, biomed engineering, and supply chain on capital and consumable decisions.
Daily responsibilities
- Case-schedule management — balancing diagnostic cath, PCI, structural heart (TAVR, MitraClip), EP ablation, and emergency STEMI activation.
- Staffing — cath lab RNs, RCIS technologists, scrub techs, anesthesia availability for structural-heart cases.
- Quality metrics — door-to-balloon times for STEMI, contrast-media utilization, procedural-complication rates, radiation-dose monitoring.
- Sterile workflow — room turnover, device inventory (stents, catheters, balloons, TAVR valves).
- Vendor relationships — imaging equipment OEM (Philips Azurion, Siemens Artis, GE Innova) plus haemodynamic system vendors.
- Capital planning — fluoroscopy platform refresh, hybrid-OR buildout, structural-heart program expansion.
- Regulatory — state radiation registration, ALARA program, physician credentialing.
What they evaluate when equipment decisions come up
- Dose-reduction capability — ClarityIQ (Philips) / equivalent GE + Siemens dose-management chains. Patient and staff dose are first-order compliance items.
- Uptime and service contract quality — a cath lab down for a day is unacceptable; OEM service responsiveness matters.
- Haemodynamics integration — Xper IM (Philips), Mac-Lab (GE), Sensis (Siemens) — the cath-lab backbone that the imaging platform has to integrate cleanly with.
- Room throughput — cases per day, imaging-chain latency, table-and-C-arm positioning speed.
- Physician ergonomics — ceiling gantry vs floor-mounted, monitor placement, table controls.
- Biplane vs single-plane — Allura biplane for pediatric cardiac / EP / complex neurovascular; single-plane for straight coronary.
- Current-gen vs refurb — Azurion / Artis icono new vs refurbished Allura Xper FD20 / Innova 4100-IQ.
Decision drivers
- ALARA compliance — patient and staff radiation safety is the dominant regulatory and clinical decision driver.
- Uptime SLA — service contract response time is not a "nice to have"; it's the cath-lab continuity plan.
- Vendor service response — local service engineer availability, parts depot proximity, remote diagnostics.
- Sterile workflow friction — how the imaging platform integrates with the sterile procedural workflow (cable routing, shield placement, table access).
- Physician preference — operators choose labs; the imaging platform a physician trained on shapes their preference.