American College of Cardiology

In 1981 the American College of Cardiology (ACC), in partnership with the American Heart Association (AHA), began developing clinical practice guidelines to assist in the diagnosis and management of patients with various cardiovascular diseases. Today, 17 ACC/AHA practice guidelines are available to support optimal cardiovascular care.

Although a number of reports have found that implementing practice guidelines leads to improvements in the quality of care delivered, others have found a discouraging lack of guideline implementation and/or impact. Despite the considerable investment in the development and dissemination of guidelines, many studies suggest that a large proportion of eligible patients do not receive the cardiovascular care recommended in guidelines. There continue to be gaps between ideal goals of evidence-based therapy and practice in treatment in several cardiovascular disease states.

The ACC launched the Guidelines Applied in Practice (GAP) Program with a project in February 2000 to learn whether providing assistance with guideline implementation could help reduce this gap between the care recommended in guidelines and that delivered in practice.

The initial GAP project implemented key recommendations from the 1999 Update of the ACC/AHA Guidelines for the Management of Patients with Acute Myocardial Infarction in selected hospitals in Southeast Michigan. The purpose of the project was to investigate whether the quality of cardiovascular care delivered could be improved through partnerships with care providers and the creation and implementation of guideline tools and processes. The project is ongoing and results will be posted as they become available.