JACC: Case Reports

Learning never exhausts the mind.

—Leonard da Vinci (1)

When we launched JACC: Case Reports exactly 1 year ago, we saw an opportunity to fill several gaps for the clinical cardiovascular community. First, we had to understand not only why clinical cases remain important to our varied readers but also their educational value. Second, we wanted to see how we could use digital technologies to present content in a transformative way. Finally, we wanted to take on the challenge of engaging cardiovascular clinicians at every stage of their careers. We felt invigorated to address these unique demands that a cardiology case reports journal could meet.

Educational Tool

At medical conferences, when a speaker wants to educate the audience, she often uses a clinical case to demonstrate a point. Clinical cases remain the proof of how we treat the everyday patient, and every doctor is driven by the recommendations and of course their clinical experiences.

In addition to clinical cases and vignettes, we have incorporated various article types, including the Heartcare Team Live with 6 questions and answers as part of a multidisciplinary meeting, and ECG Challenges—a step that makes the education provided by the Journal more dynamic and engaging. For our clinician education, we also have a particular focus on wellbeing through our Voices of Cardiology section, which concentrates on the human side of patient care from all perspectives—from the senior-level physician to the early-career cardiologist or fellow-in-training, as well as the patient. For the Voices of Cardiology section, we have published essays exploring the patient-physician relationship and others providing the patient’s perspective, all taken from the varied and complex experiences of medical care. We learn from our authors every day, and all of our life stories are an integral part of each individual’s development as a physician.

Furthermore, as we started providing editorial comments for certain cases, our next challenge was to reformat the editorial comments into an educational supplement to a clinical case. Our Editorial Comments focus on a step-by-step approach to a technique, algorithms, comparison of clinical experiences, and illustrations that summarize pathologies. This technique for editorial comments has proved to be quite successful based on metrics from Altmetric Score and Google Analytics manuscript download data.

A forthcoming educational initiative is the special issue with American College of Cardiology (ACC) 2020 fellows-in-training clinical cases, wherein the Editorial Board selected the top 15% of clinical cases from the ACC annual meeting and invited their submissions to be published in a dedicated issue. This will expand their educational reach, and was initiated even before we knew how coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) would influence our lives. We are honored to mention that these cases will be published as a supplementary issue in June. We previously delivered a special issue as a collaboration with TCT in December 2019, and an issue entirely dedicated to cardiovascular disease in women in January 2020, and, in collaboration with Society for Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions, we are preparing a special issue on the mechanical complications of acute coronary syndromes due to the late presentations associated with the COVID-19 lockdown. A great achievement has been the special issue on COVID-19 cases, with many “first” papers that helped us in our understanding of COVID-19 cardiovascular manifestations.

A Dynamic Approach and Multimedia

Early on, we recognized that we would have to continuously innovate in order to engage a busy, clinically oriented readership at all stages. As an example, in the last 2 issues of JACC: Case Reports, we started a new initiative named da Vinci Corner. Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomy drawings are a part of the history of medicine: the ability to correlate the clinical presentation with anatomy and histology is of high educational value. Two more corners within the Journal are the Educational Corner, wherein we present an old value that is useful to all the physicians, and the Technical Corner, which presents specific techniques and elaborates on a step-by-step approach, as if the reader were studying a manual.

One of the important developments of this Journal is the podcast and webinar series. For clinical cases, it felt like a more engaging environment for the podcast to be an active discussion between colleagues—an active interaction between the editorial board member and the discussant. This was a great way of engaging our editorial board and our authors. Last month, considering that many people were social distancing, we decided to record video case presentations on our mini focus issue on valvular heart disease and structural interventions. We have a few other video presentations planned, and we will determine their value based on your engagement.

From the young but addressing all stages of training

Another challenge for us was the constant need of the young people to learn and develop, which is why we perceived of the Journal as a mentorship vehicle. Our aim was to bring together a young doctor from one country together with a senior colleague from across the world to allow them to write an editorial together. This is a unique way for the junior colleagues to work together with the people they admire and learn from them. When we started developing the editorial board for this Journal, we were aware that a vital part would be the young community, especially the fellows-in-training, who carry a lot of passion and energy, and deserve a platform. Therefore, when creating the groups within the editorial board, we kept in mind our belief that it is important to teach young colleagues how to review a clinical case and a manuscript, how to develop academic writing skills, how to write editorials, how to help with social media, and how to become active members of the publishing community. We have a meeting once a month in which we discuss initiatives. Likewise, another important part of this Journal is to engage our senior colleagues, who trusted us and have become great mentors for their young colleagues. Their expertise, knowledge, and energy are valuable contributions to the Journal’s success.

Importantly, we started by ensuring that clinical cases would address all levels of clinicians—from young people who are eager to publish their first paper up to senior colleagues whose knowledge was tested by a complicated technique. Thus, in JACC: Case Reports, we classified clinical cases into 3 levels of expertise: Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced. It serves to help our readers to understand the complexity of the cases.

JACC: Case Reports: What Is Next?

JACC: Case Reports requires a great deal of dedication, mostly enhanced by the current significant increase of manuscripts related to COVID-19 social distancing, but we are motivated by the positive responses from our readers, and the support within JACC Journals and the ACC is a driving force.

To summarize, JACC: Case Reports has been transformed into an educational vehicle as well as a forum for mentorship on the review and publication process. We have managed to address all stages of training, from young to senior colleagues, and bring them together. Last, but not least, this platform is engaging, and we hope that it corresponds to your expectations.

The future is bright, there is no doubt. It is our mission to inspire young colleagues to feel encouraged and promoted and to work with senior colleagues, given their expertise and context, in order for all to learn from each other. With this Editors’ Page, we would like to extend a heartfelt thank you for all your support and this wonderful year. We welcome your feedback on current and future initiatives. We are looking forward to 1 more exciting year.