This post was authored by Deepak L. Bhatt, MD, MPH, FACC, and James G. Jollis, MD, FACC, co-chairs of the ACC’s ACTION Registry-GWTG steering committee.

ACC’s ACTION Registry-GWTG recently welcomed its 1,000th participating hospital – Florida Hospital Celebration Health. This marks an important milestone for the registry and for the larger cardiovascular community because it serves as evidence that the registry is and will continue to contribute to improved care and outcomes for ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) and non-STEMI patients. With a history of evolving to meet the demands of changing science and definitions of quality care, the registry has brought real, life-saving changes for this patient population.

As part of the ACC’s NCDR, the ACTION Registry-GWTG assists hospitals in measuring and improving guideline adherence for the treatment of acute myocardial infarction patients, providing participating hospitals with quarterly, nationally benchmarked reports and access to real-time quality improvement tools.

The registry was formed as the NCDR’s fourth registry in January 2007, when the College transitioned from the existing CRUSADE and NRMI Registries. A little more than a year later, ACTION merged with the AHA’s Get with the Guidelines (GWTG)-CAD program to become ACTION Registry-GWTG. The ACTION Registry-GWTG supports data collection for the AHA Mission: Lifeline program, which is helping to create STEMI systems of care and improve existing ones to ensure prompt and effective treatment to STEMI patients.

The registry has also been instrumental in several other key quality initiatives falling under the umbrella of the ACC’s Quality Improvement for Institutions, including the Door to Balloon (D2B) Initiative. The D2B Initiative was recently hailed as a great success in the New York Times article titled “A Sea Change in Treating Heart Attacks.” The article credits the D2B initiative with helping more than 1,200 hospitals nationwide improve the timeliness of reperfusion therapy for patients with heart attacks by facilitating the adoption of evidence and guideline-based best practices – and partially attributes a 38 percent decrease in coronary heart disease deaths from 2003 to 2013 to this effort.

Surviving MI, an ACC quality initiative that focuses on reducing 30-day risk-standardized mortality for patients hospitalized with acute myocardial infarction, uses selected ACTION Registry-GWTG measures and metrics to report on successes. In 2014, the ACC launched the ACC Patient Navigator Program, which has enrolled 35 hospitals participating in both ACTION Registry-GWTG and the ACC’s Hospital to Home Initiative. The program employs measures from the registry and provides tools and resources for participating hospitals to apply a team-based approach to keeping patients at home and healthy after discharge from the hospital.

In addition to these practice-changing initiatives, the ACTION Registry-GWTG has supported more than 70 peer-review manuscripts and nearly 80 scientific abstract presentations. As the number of sites and the patient population continue to grow, the registry will continue to provide deeper clinical insights and help answer questions about approaches to care and outcomes for STEMI and NSTEMI patients.

Upcoming registry initiatives will likely allow integration of efforts across the continuum from pre-hospital cardiovascular care to discharge, with a greater focus on tracking longer term outcomes. This achievement of 1,000 hospitals in the ACTION Registry-GWTG program is something all the participating hospitals should be proud of, as it reflects a sincere commitment to the care of present and future patients.

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