Jonathan Vafai, MD

Cardiology has been my sole focus and life's work. I care deeply about my patients and approach every visit the way I would want my own family to be treated—with time, honesty, compassion, and respect.

My philosophy is lifestyle first whenever possible. Exercise, nutrition, and daily habits form the foundation of heart health, and medications or procedures are added thoughtfully when they truly serve your best interest. When I make a recommendation, it is never routine—it is based on experience, evidence, and a genuine belief that it is right for you.

My role is to educate, guide, and offer clear advice; your role is to make the decisions that feel right for your life and values. The best care happens when we work together through shared decision-making.

I have trained at leading hospitals in New York and Boston, and that experience continues to guide my care today. Even while practicing here in Florida, I rely on a broad national perspective and a trusted network of outstanding specialists. When referrals are needed, I send patients to people I trust and would confidently recommend to my own family.

I am deeply grateful for the trust my patients place in me. It is a privilege to care for you and to be part of your team.

— Jonathan Vafai, MD

I decided on cardiology in medical school, while helping care for a man through a heart attack, bypass surgery, and the long recovery that followed. What struck me was not the operation. It was being one of the people who saw him through all of it. Cardiology is full of that: relationships measured in years and built on trust, where you follow the same person through the decisions that matter instead of meeting them once.

Imaging became my corner of it for a related reason. An echocardiogram lets you see what is happening inside someone's chest without doing anything invasive to them — how the muscle is moving, how the valves are working, how the heart is filling and emptying. A tremendous amount can be learned about a person's heart from a probe, some gel, and the patience to read the study carefully. That has never stopped appealing to me, and it is why I still read my own patients' studies rather than handing them off.

I have also stayed where I am because of who I work with. My partners are among the smartest and most caring physicians I know. We collaborate constantly and challenge each other just as often, which is the part that keeps you sharp. The honest measure of it is this: when I am away, I am glad they are the ones looking after my patients, and I have trusted them with my own family.

I grew up in New Jersey and spent medical school, residency, and fellowship between New York and Boston before coming to Florida.

Most of what I recommend to patients about exercise, I am also negotiating with myself. I ride a Peloton at home, two or three times a week when the schedule cooperates, which is less than I would like and probably sounds familiar to anyone trying to fit training around a job. I ride to keep my endurance up, not to win anything. When I tell someone that the unglamorous easy-pace riding is doing most of the real work, I am describing what I do myself rather than reciting a guideline.

When I have time I also shoot photographs — finding the image, working on it afterward, and showing it to someone. There is probably a reason the imaging side of cardiology appealed to me.

More than anything, I am watching lipids. Lp(a), ApoB, and the therapies arriving now for people statins were never going to be enough for. For most of my career we have treated cholesterol through convenient proxies; we are getting closer to treating the things that actually drive risk, and that is the most genuinely exciting development I have seen in cardiology in some time.

I am an interested skeptic about AI in medicine, and the way I got there was by using it rather than reading about it.

The one that changed my days most is the ambient scribe. It listens to the visit and drafts the note, which means I am looking at the person in front of me instead of at a screen, and the note is finished when the visit is. The platform is private and HIPAA-compliant, and recordings stay inside that protected environment. Anyone who has watched a doctor type through their appointment knows what the old way was costing.

For research it has collapsed the time between a question and a defensible answer. When an unusual case or a newly published trial comes up mid-clinic, I can have the research in a minute or two rather than at the end of the day. In imaging, HeartFlow and Cleerly analysis of coronary CT do real work on studies I would otherwise be interpreting with less information.

Then there is the unglamorous half: letters, prior authorizations, the administrative sediment that accumulates around medicine and has nothing to do with caring for anyone. Handing that to a machine is not a clinical breakthrough, but it gives hours back.

The surprise has been programming. I wrote code before medicine took over, and that part of me had quietly atrophied for twenty years. These tools threw me straight back into software development — this website and the system that publishes my blog posts are things I build and maintain myself, and I have several other apps underway, some for the practice and some purely for my own interest. It has made me a far better judge of AI than any amount of reading would have, because you learn quickly where it is strong and exactly where it is confidently wrong.

That last part is the whole of my skepticism. A tool that is right most of the time is a different thing from a tool you can stop checking, and the distance between those two is exactly where patients get hurt. I treat all of it as capable assistance and nothing more.