Heart Rhythm Society: expert consensus statements-part 1.

One of the most important roles for professional societies in medicine is assembling multiple stakeholders and experts to develop documents that can help guide and define policies and strategies for best medical care. Each year the Heart Rhythm Society (HRS) develops several consensus documents that address critical clinical subjects that have been identified by input from HRS members and HRS committees. Over the past 5 years, HRS has produced documents with multiple professional societies from around the world, and although the topics chosen for exploration center around arrhythmia management, the reviews and recommendations made in the documents are important for clinical cardiologists and generalists who are not arrhythmia specialists. When an internist or other primary care provider identifies a patient who may be having symptoms from an arrhythmia, the referral first is made to the clinical cardiologist and only later, if necessary, does an arrhythmia specialist become involved. These expert consensus statements are developed for specific clinical questions regarding arrhythmia management where there is controversy or uncertainty, often with less data from randomized controlled trials to help guide recommendations, which must then be made by extrapolation of existing data, observational data, and expert opinion. In this 2-part review, the consensus statements developed by the HRS over the past 5 years that pertain to adults are discussed in part 1; part 2 focuses on consensus statements that HRS has developed in conjunction with the Pediatric and Congenital Electrophysiology Society that address arrhythmia issues in children and adults with congenital heart disease.