American College of Cardiology

This is an important step for the College and yet another example of the leadership role the ACCF is playing in promoting quality, evidence-based care. CMS approached the professional medical societies for assistance in developing these performance measures, a positive trend that illustrates how government agencies are more and more recognizing national efforts, such as ACC's, to define and evaluate quality care.

While these measures are based upon and directly promote the use of ACC/AHA clinical practice guidelines, it is important to note that they are not practice guidelines. Rather, they are specific measures that are indicative of quality, evidence-based care, such as beta blocker therapy for heart failure patients with left ventricular systolic dysfunction and drug therapy for lowering LDL-cholesterol for patients with stable coronary artery disease.

In addition, ACC in partnership with AHA are developing physician-level performance measures for both inpatient and outpatient settings. A methodology article has been published that establishes an objective, evidence based process to guide the selection and creation of performance measures for quantifying the quality of cardiovascular care. Performance measurement sets are soon to be released for heart failure and STEMI/NSTEMI patients.

As state and federal level efforts to measure quality and publicly report outcomes continue to expand, it is important that physicians be involved in every step of the process. As such, the ACC—through projects such as this collaboration with the AMA, through our ACC/AHA Task Force on Performance Measures and through the National Cardiovascular Data Registry—will continue to ensure that cardiovascular specialists play a central and guiding role in defining and measuring quality of care.

Download the three performance measures: