Queensland first: Private hospitals deploy Abbott’s PFA in atrial fibrillation

More Australians living with atrial fibrillation (AF) are gaining access to one of the latest advances in heart-rhythm treatment, with sister hospitals The Wesley and St Andrew’s War Memorial Hospital becoming the first private hospitals in Queensland to introduce Abbott’s Volt Pulsed Field Ablation (PFA) system.

The hospitals’ cardiac teams, including Dr Waheed Ahmad, Dr Deepak Arumugam, Dr Thomas Basso and Dr Matthew Rowe, were joined in some of the first cases by international expert Professor Philipp Sommer, drawing on his extensive clinical experience with the technology in Germany.

Atrial fibrillation is the most common cardiac arrhythmia, affecting more than 500,000 people and contributing to roughly 219,000 hospitalisations each year.

Australia has also played an important role in the development of PFA technology. The first global clinical trial of the Volt PFA system was conducted in Australia in January 2024, under the leadership of Professor Prash Sanders at the University of Adelaide.

“Abbott has designed a novel PFA solution that, when combined with its EnSite X cardiac mapping system, can address hard-to-treat irregular heartbeats with a level of accuracy and precision that’s never before been possible,” said Professor Sanders at the time.

The technology has since progressed through international clinical evaluation. Data from the VOLT-AF IDE study, involving 392 patients across 40 centres in Australia, the United States, Europe and Canada, found that the Volt PFA system demonstrated clinically meaningful performance in both safety and efficacy across two patient populations. These included patients with paroxysmal atrial fibrillation (PAF), in which episodes come and go, as well as those with persistent AFib (PersAF), where episodes last longer than seven days.

Australia’s capacity to measure and benchmark AF care remains constrained by gaps in data infrastructure. A recent study identified a lack of a population-level registry, limiting the ability to track longitudinal outcomes, monitor treatment patterns and benchmark performance.

The international experience with PFA adoption has so far suggested that early market entry provides a meaningful competitive advantage. More recently approved PFA systems such as the Volt may face the challenge of entering hospitals that have already invested in one or more PFA platforms.

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