With cardiovascular disease the No. 1 cause of death among patients with Type 2 diabetes, ACC's new TRANSFORM CVRiD initiative is designed reduce this trend and promote cardiovascular risk reduction in this patient population. The two-year quality improvement initiative is in partnership with Novo Nordisk Inc.

"Patients with diabetes face a very high risk of developing cardiovascular disease and require individualized care involving multiple specialties and therapies to ensure they are receiving the best possible care," ACC President Athena Poppas, MD, FACC, said.

"This initiative will be critical to achieving a progressive path forward in the management of cardiovascular risk in Type 2 diabetes."

Creating individualized management and prevention strategies for people with Type 2 diabetes has become increasingly complex, especially when physicians have to navigate new clinical guidelines, pathways and novel therapy choices. To address this, TRANSFORM CVRiD will use real-world data from the ACC/Veradigm PINNACLE Registry and Diabetes Collaborative Registry to identify patterns that lead to optimal care and develop tools and education to support clinicians whose patients match those criteria.

TRANSFORM-CVRiD is a quality improvement initiative involving a real-world population study that seeks to enable clinicians to better identify meaningful ways to improve quality of care. At the end of the program, researchers should be able to determine the rate of consistent guideline usage, compare sites on cardiovascular risk and treatment patterns with different classes of diabetes drugs and understand barriers to optimal care through qualitative best practices research.

To get there, researchers will examine data from an initial national study looking at people with atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease to assess their adherence to current ACC guidelines and clinical recommendations. The analysis will answer key questions on diabetes management and provide a population-level diabetes risk assessment.

After a baseline assessment, select regional clinician practices and hospitals will be identified to receive interventions to support the right treatment strategies matched to the right patients. These interventions include education, quality improvement strategies and resources and quality improvement tools, such as decision aids and checklists, delivered through ACC Quality Ambassadors.

"Every physician treating someone with Type 2 diabetes wants to have the confidence that they're using the right medicine and applying the right guidelines at the right time. We have a great opportunity, based on our collective experience in diabetes and cardiovascular disease, to help health care professionals make evidence-based decisions to help their patients," said Anne Phillips, MD, senior vice president, Clinical Development, Medical and Regulatory Affairs for Novo Nordisk.

"We're looking forward to learning through this research, alongside our ACC partners, and implementing a program that can help improve the quality of care for people with Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease."

This initiative is the latest under the TRANSFORM umbrella. ACC introduced TRANSFORM as a new kind of quality research program aimed to improve health care by transforming the quality of care across the multi-faceted areas of cardiovascular disease. TRANSFORM programs leverage clinical registry data to identify patient level treatment opportunities and pair them with office-based interventions, and partnerships to include the pharmaceutical and medical device industry, health plans, employers, clinicians and patients.

Keywords: Diabetes Mellitus, Type 2, Risk Factors, Cardiovascular Diseases, Quality Improvement, Cause of Death, Risk Assessment, Hypoglycemic Agents, Medicine, Health Personnel, Registries, Decision Support Techniques, National Cardiovascular Data Registries, PINNACLE Registry

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