Creation and evolution of the North American Society of Pacing and Electrophysiology (NASPE)

The NORTH AMERICAN SOCIETY OF PACING AND ELECTROPHYSIOLOGY (NASPE) was founded in 1979 because of a long felt need to provide an organization and a forum to serve a discipline many felt to be underserved by existing professional organizations, journals, andmajor national meetings in North America. To the founding group this seemed an egregious omission, inconsistent with the growing importance of pacing in the therapy of cardiac arrhythmias. An organizationwas needed to encourage research and clinical accomplishment and its presentation to colleagues in medicine and the allied sciences. The new society was intended to provide a forum where industry, a major element of the creative process of, would be able to present and discuss its ongoing research and accomplishment in scientific rather than solely commercial terms and before some research achievements were ready for commercialization. This new organization was also to represent the medical pacing community to regulators and to reimbursement institutions and other professional organizations. Among other perceived deficiencies was the absence of a unified medical voice in 1976 when the Medical Device Amendment to the Food and Drug Act was proposed. The existing Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) could not speak for the medical community or for the industrial community as a whole.1 Initial discussions began early in 1979 between Drs. Michael Bilitch, J. Warren Harthorne, Dryden Morse, Victor Parsonnet, and this author, based in part on the success of the Boston Pacemaker ClubwhichHarthorne had founded in 1973. It was soon recognized that the idea of such an organization was powerful and the more it was discussed, the more its logic propelled the effort with Harthorne providing written proposals and immense organizational effort. On April 12, 1979 Harthorne circulated an outline of his proposal for organizing a national cardiac pacing society. He posed the questions of whether the proposed society should be independent of existing national cardiologic societies and