This *post is authored by Andrew M. Freeman, MD, FACC, chair of the ACC’s Early Career Professionals Section, and editor of the Patient-Centered Care CardioSource Clinical Community.

We’ve all been there – a busy clinic with a patient who has lots of questions and can’t quite make sense of your chicken-scratch, grade-school level coronary tree drawings. If you’re not in the medical field, it’s often very hard to wrap one’s head around the fact that someone is going to stick a balloon in the artery that supplies your heart. Of course, you’ve been working diligently to make sure that your patients are truly in the know, understand what’s going to be done to them, and that they are “captaining” their own health-ship. Being patient-centered in your delivery of care means involving your patients in their decisions about medications, intervention, and the overall disease processes. But, as we all have experienced, getting a patient up to speed quickly can be a daunting task.

This is where your ACC steps in. With the CardioSmart Explorer App for the iPad 2, you can select from many common health conditions and “bring to life” for patients what these conditions mean and what their treatments can look like. With a wave of your fingers, you can show a patient their heart muscle, its coronary anatomy, and the processes of a stent implantation. You can also mark up an anatomically and functionally correct digital model of the heart, and email this image directly to your patient. If your patient has atrial fibrillation, you can now show them how the electrical system of the heart works and how it can go awry.

The power of this application lies in its user friendliness, availability on the iOS (Apple) platform and its ability to show disease states and treatments with animations and pictures. Really, a picture is worth thousands of words. The concept of coronary disease and PCI with stenting can now be explained in 2 minutes instead of 20 – and can be instantly rewound, forwarded, and played in slow motion until all can grasp what this means.

Ultimately, this means your patient no longer comes to you with the “I don’t know what they did to me 5 years ago, but it involved a hole in my leg” phrase. Instead, you have a well-informed patient who understands exactly what has been done and why. Discussing procedures is now easier, and the risks and benefits of those procedures can be more clearly explained when the patient understands just how the procedure works.

As you can tell, the excitement behind this powerful application is tremendous – and for good reason. This kind of technology is the future of patient-centered medicine and no longer relies on “back-of-the-napkin” line drawings. Your ACC is proud to have brought this project to fruition, for you, our valued members.

This week is National Public Health Week, check out CardioSmart.org and the Patient-Centered Care CardioSource Clinical Community for additional tools and resources available to help prevent, treat and manage cardiovascular disease, while facilitating patient-centered care.

*A version of this article also ran in the CardioSmart Tech column on the Patient-Centered Care CardioSource Clinical Community.

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