Improving patient engagement and ultimately outcomes and experience is not only embedded in ACC's Vision, but it's also fundamental to achieving many of the College's strategic priorities.

For more than two decades, the ACC has leveraged its NCDR registries to provide data-driven quality improvement, while quality campaigns like the highly successful Door-to-Balloon Alliance, Hospital to Home, Surviving MI, Reduce the Risk: PCI Bleed and Patient Navigator programs have also contributed to changing hospital cultures and saving lives in the U.S. and around the world by helping to both identify and close gaps in care. In the last five years, the addition of ACC Accreditation Services has further propelled quality improvement by providing evidence-based and nationally accepted standards for hospitals and institutions to improve and streamline clinical care processes.

Expert Consensus Decision Pathways and ACC's Heart House Roundtables have also been added to the College's quality improvement toolbox in the last 10 years. To date, Expert Consensus Decision Pathways have been developed in a number of areas, including heart failure treatment, same-day discharge after PCI, valvular heart disease, tobacco cessation, cardiovascular risk reduction in diabetes, and more. ACC's Heart House Roundtables, made up of key stakeholders from other specialty societies, government agencies, industry, as well as clinicians and patients, are often the starting point for these Pathway documents and other solution set tools. Since 2013, roundtables have focused on a number of areas including anticoagulation, dyslipidemia, cardio-oncology, risk communication and most recently COVID-19.

Focused quality programs like those falling under the TRANSFORM umbrella are the latest additions to ACC's comprehensive quality improvement efforts. The ACC introduced TRANSFORM as a new kind of quality research initiative aimed at improving health care by transforming the quality of care across the multi-faceted areas of cardiovascular disease. TRANSFORM programs leverage clinical registry data, office-based interventions and partnerships to include Veradigm, MedAxiom, the pharmaceutical and medical device industry, including Amgen, Novartis, Novo Nordisk, innovative companies like HealthReveal, health plans, employers, clinicians and patients. Current TRANSFORM programs include: TRANSFORM: ACS, TRANSFORM CVRiD, and TRANSFORM HFrEF, with a fourth program to launch soon.

Another newly launched quality initiative will address gaps in care and knowledge around hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), one of the most common cardiovascular genetic diseases. The ACC has received a grant from Bristol Myers Squibb for the AIME HCM (Accelerating Innovation for Medical Excellence in Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy) initiative to increase the awareness and understanding of HCM, activate clinicians and optimize disease management to improve outcomes. On the global front, programs like the Global Heart Attack Treatment Initiative, the Global Cardiovascular Institute, and NCD Academy, are all designed to help clinicians stay up-to-date on the latest developments and breakthroughs in cardiovascular science, foster sharing of best practices in clinical care, and help tangibly prevent and treat cardiovascular disease in countries around the world.

"The ACC is mission-driven to transform cardiovascular care for all of our patients. There is a real need for actionable tools for hospitals, practices, clinicians and patients worldwide to most effectively manage treatment, reduce risks and improve outcomes," said ACC President Dipti Itchhaporia, MD, FACC. "Through our NCDR registries, ACC Accreditation Services and quality initiatives we are optimizing clinical guidance by providing necessary education, resources and support that can be used at the point of care to ensure the right treatment at the right time for all."

Clinical Topics: Anticoagulation Management, COVID-19 Hub, Diabetes and Cardiometabolic Disease, Dyslipidemia, Heart Failure and Cardiomyopathies, Invasive Cardiovascular Angiography and Intervention, Valvular Heart Disease, Acute Heart Failure, Interventions and Structural Heart Disease

Keywords: ACC Annual Scientific Session, ACC21, ACC Publications, Cardiology Magazine, National Cardiovascular Data Registries, Heart Failure, Quality Improvement, Tobacco Use Cessation, Percutaneous Coronary Intervention, COVID-19, Patient Navigation, Stroke Volume, Myocardial Infarction, Myocardial Infarction, Cardiomyopathy, Hypertrophic, Diabetes Mellitus, Dyslipidemias, Dyslipidemias, Heart Valve Diseases, Neoplasms, Anticoagulants, Risk Factors

< Back to Listings