This post is authored by Richard Kovacs, MD, FACC, chair of the Best Practices and Quality Improvement Subcommittee, a subcommittee of the College’s Clinical Quality Committee.

The ACC is leveraging AFib Awareness month to highlight the many ways the College has stayed on top of the clinical and practice needs and demands of CV professionals in what is truly an evolving landscape.

This month the ACC launched an Atrial Fibrillation (AFib) Toolkit to provide tools and strategies for the patient care team to support high-quality care for patients with AFib.  Rather than only defining high-quality AFib care as defined by clinical performance on National Quality Forum endorsed measures, the AFib Toolkit establishes clear goals for overall high-quality AFib care by identifying and filling gaps in the knowledge and behavior of the patient and the patient care team in meeting these goals.

Included in the AFib Toolkit:

• Five tools focused on diagnosis and risk assessment
• Four tools, plus 23 individual drug monographs, for treatment and management of AFib
• Three tools focused on patient education

As noted in last week’s blog post, AFib is the most common arrhythmia in clinical practice, and is responsible for 15-20 percent of all strokes, which account for 1 in 17 deaths in the U.S. and rank third among all causes of death after heart disease and cancer. In addition to improving clinician adherence to National Quality Forum endorsed performance measures for AFib, the AFib Toolkit will increase patient awareness of the risks associated with AFib, and enhance patient engagement in their AFib care plan.  Provider understanding and inclusion of patient behavior, choices, and lifestyles in care planning is especially important with AFib because of the rapidly evolving landscape of AFib therapies.  The AFib Toolkit is an opportunity to identify approaches for supporting the patient-provider partnership in meeting care goals among considerable safety and efficacy concerns.

In addition to the AFib toolkit, the ACC provides innovative educational programs like A New ERA v 2.0, a free Performance Improvement-Continuing Medical Education activity designed to help physicians improve the care of their patients with atrial fibrillation. To track data of patients with AFib, last year the PINNACLE Registry launched a new platform, PINNACLE-AF, focusing on atrial fibrillation and including the next generation of anticoagulants. Currently a new national anticoagulation initiative, led by ACC, is under development to drive awareness of the efficacy and safety of new anticoagulation therapies.

In the end, whether we’re talking about AFib, or another area identified as ripe for improvement, ACC members need real-time, easy-to-use solutions that cross the spectrum of quality, advocacy and education and bring about real change. The efforts underway by a multi-disciplinary team of ACC members and staff are bringing these tools to life.

This blog post is part of a series of blog posts during AFib Awareness Month. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for more information from the College on AFib news, tools and initiatives. Also visit ACC’s Facebook page for additional information.

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