Pan-Vascular Medicine: One Vascular System, One Plan

Most patients arrive at a hospital with a diagnosis attached to one organ: a blocked coronary artery, a narrowed carotid, a leg that cramps after two hundred metres. Each is real. Each is also, very often, one expression of a single process running through the entire arterial tree.

That is the premise of pan-vascular medicine — and it was the subject of the International Pan-Vascular Medicine Symposium held in Shanghai on 26 October 2026, convened by SinoUnited Health under the theme Pan-Vascular Without Borders, Innovation From Shanghai. The meeting also served as the first working session of the hospital's International Pan-Vascular Academic Committee, and the occasion on which its International Pan-Vascular Second Opinion Service was announced.

The symposium was chaired by Prof. Ge Junbo (葛均波), academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and director of cardiology at Zhongshan Hospital, Fudan University — the physician most closely associated with the pan-vascular concept in China. Alongside him: specialists in cardiology, vascular surgery, neurology, endocrinology and metabolism, and general practice, together with guests from cross-border healthcare, medical devices and the media.

1. Why one specialty is not enough

Prof. Ge opened with the argument that reframes everything that follows. Non-communicable disease is now the leading cause of death in China, and the country has roughly 330 million people living with cardiovascular disease. Among them, about one in four carries more than one chronic condition at once.

Care organised by organ and by specialty struggles with that arithmetic. A patient's coronary history sits in one department, the carotid ultrasound in another, the diabetes in a third — and the follow-up plan that should connect them belongs to none of them. What breaks first is not any single treatment but the continuity between treatments.

Pan-vascular medicine takes the arterial system as one organ. Risk identification, prevention, diagnosis, intervention and long-term management are treated as a single sequence, and the clinical question shifts from how do we fix this lesion to how do we keep this vascular system stable over the next twenty years.

The vehicle for that in practice is the Pan-Vascular Management Centre (PVMC) — less a department than a standing multidisciplinary platform. Cardiology, vascular surgery, neurology, endocrinology and metabolism, imaging and laboratory medicine assess the same patient together, so that risk screening, clinical intervention and continued follow-up happen inside one system rather than across four referral letters. Increasingly, large-model AI is folded into image interpretation, risk prediction and out-of-hospital follow-up — moving decisions that once rested entirely on individual expert experience toward something measurable and reproducible. Prof. Ge closed on a point that is easy to skip: chronic disease management depends on many parties, but it depends most on the patient's own participation.

2. From repairing a vessel to restoring vascular homeostasis

Prof. Fu Weiguo (符伟国), professor of vascular surgery at Zhongshan Hospital, Fudan University, described the same shift from inside his own discipline: a move away from specialty-centred care toward patient-centred care, and a change of endpoint from a vessel made patent to a vascular system kept stable.

A successful operation, in that framing, is not a good angiographic result at one site. It is the patient's whole vascular tree holding up over time. From a whole-vascular-bed view, the surgeon's decisions — preoperative risk stratification, when to intervene, which technique to use — are made against the entire circulation rather than the segment on the screen.

Prof. Fu illustrated the point with two decades of his team's own device work: stent refinements and steerable catheters that became international standards, an in-situ fenestration technique adopted worldwide, and the first bare-stent aortic dissection device approved anywhere. None of it came from vascular surgery alone — each advance sat at the intersection with materials science, imaging and engineering. The next layer is already visible: AI-assisted image analysis, preoperative planning and risk prediction, and digital-twin rehearsal that lets an operation be performed in simulation before it is performed on a patient.

3. The real barrier is trust, not technology

Dr. Kathy Shi (史浩颖) took the argument across the border. Clinical capability, she said, does not convert into a patient's trust by itself; trust is built when capability is turned into something a patient can perceive, reach and rely on. It is also not the product of any single step: it accumulates across the weeks before arrival, the days in hospital and the months after departure, through outcomes, safety, communication, follow-up — and through whether each of those felt handled.

The hospital's own numbers describe the base it is built on: more than 2 million patient visits delivered, including hundreds of thousands of outpatient visits by international patients. The Heart & Vascular Centre runs a one-stop model in which first assessment, same-day imaging and laboratory work, and clinic-to-catheter-lab procedures connect without a second queue. A digital platform links hospital records to patients' own wearable devices, so a multidisciplinary team can follow several conditions in parallel and adjust a chronic-disease plan between visits; more than 30,000 patients are now managed that way.

She illustrated continuity with a case rather than a claim: a British patient visiting family in Shanghai developed cardiac symptoms and came straight to the emergency department. Diagnosis, treatment and discharge followed without a gap — and the family's summary of the experience has since become a phrase the hospital quotes: “Always support, always care.”

4. What the new service actually does

The International Pan-Vascular Second Opinion Service announced at the symposium covers four domains:

Its value is in the sequence. A second opinion delivered as a single written reply is of limited use to a patient who still has to arrange the treatment; this one is built as a chain from the first document to the last follow-up:

5. An academic committee, and three arguments

The symposium's second formal act was the certification of the International Pan-Vascular Academic Committee, chaired by Prof. Ge, with members drawn from cardiology, cardiovascular surgery, neurology, general practice, endocrinology, vascular surgery and radiology across several institutions. Its stated purpose is unglamorous and useful: a standing platform for expert exchange, clinical collaboration and the construction of service processes — the part of international care that is usually invisible and usually where it fails.

Three roundtables followed, and between them they set out the argument the meeting was making.

6. The long version of “one plan”

“One vascular system, one plan” is easy to say and expensive to mean. It means a patient with coronary disease, a narrowed carotid and a failing leg circulation is assessed by people who talk to each other; it means the plan covers the decade after discharge, not the week after the procedure; and for a patient who flew in from another country, it means the plan does not dissolve when the flight home takes off.

Dr. Shi put the intention in a sentence the symposium returned to more than once: SinoUnited will keep working on pan-vascular diagnosis and second-opinion services so that international patients get long-term vascular management that is usable, affordable and continuous — and so that what is being built in Shanghai becomes, in her phrase, a calling card connecting Chinese medicine to patients around the world.

Related reading

Chronic Total Occlusion: Why a Second Reading Can Change the Plan — two cases in which a frame-by-frame review of an angiogram replaced bypass surgery with a single targeted procedure.

Remote Consultation & Second Opinion — how records are collected, reviewed and answered before a patient decides whether to travel.