Dr A M Thirugnanam, MD, MSICP, FSCAI, Ph.D. is a senior interventional cardiologist practising in Hyderabad, India, a Fellow of the Society for Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions, and the founder of the Academy of Elite Doctors. He is the author of more than forty cardiology titles spanning clinical reference, examination preparation, imaging, acute care and patient education.
Clinical practice
More than two decades in complex coronary and structural intervention. The clinical work is what the writing is drawn from: the books describe decisions taken in a real catheterisation laboratory, under real time pressure, with the constraints that exist outside a trial protocol. Areas of particular focus are primary angioplasty and door-to-device pathways, complex and bifurcation coronary intervention, structural and valvular procedures, and the management of complications both in the laboratory and on the ward afterwards.
Teaching
Teaching has run alongside practice throughout. The Academy’s course programme, its CME meetings and the weekly case discussion are all taught or chaired personally, and every mentoring call on the mentorship track is taken personally rather than delegated — which is why each intake is capped rather than open.
Writing
The titles fall into five groups: clinical references written to be reopened rather than read once; examination question banks with every distractor explained; imaging and ECG guides built around a fixed reading sequence; acute care protocols organised by the minute rather than by the chapter; and patient-facing books written to be handed across a consulting desk. The full catalogue is in the Academy reading list.
Editorial approach
Three commitments run through everything published under this name. Recommendations are traced to primary guidance from the ACC, AHA and ESC rather than to secondary summaries. Where those bodies disagree, the disagreement is stated rather than resolved for the reader’s convenience. And where the evidence is genuinely thin, that is said, even where a confident sentence would read better.
The Academy
The Academy of Elite Doctors was founded to give clinicians outside major tertiary centres the teaching, the research support and the professional community that are otherwise concentrated in a small number of institutions. Its purpose is set out on the mission page, its governance on the committee page, and its research work on the research page.
Contact
Enquiries about speaking, teaching, research collaboration, foreword requests or bulk and institutional supply go through the contact page. Clinicians wanting personal supervision rather than a course should read the mentorship track.