DALLAS, Nov. 4, 2009 – The American Heart Association has launched a new program to improve the quality of patient care in the healthcare professional office setting.

Get With The Guidelines®-Outpatient is the latest in a series of the association’s quality improvement initiatives. It builds on the success of nearly 10 years experience in quality improvement and over two million lives touched through the Get With The Guidelines suite, including Get With The Guidelines®-Coronary Artery Disease, Get With The Guidelines®-Heart Failure and Get With The Guidelines®-Stroke.

While the Get With The Guidelines hospital-based quality improvement initiative has demonstrated improved quality of care for cardiovascular disease and stroke patients in hospitals, the outpatient module is designed to measure, compare and improve the quality of care that cardiology, neurology, internal medicine and primary care healthcare professionals provide in the outpatient setting.

“This is a logical extension of the Get With The Guidelines hospital initiative,” said Vincent Bufalino, M.D, chair of the American Heart Association’s Ambulatory Advisory Working Group, the volunteer leaders behind Get With The Guidelines-Outpatient. “In the average patient’s healthcare history, probably 5 percent is spent in the hospital setting, while 90 to 95 percent is spent in the outpatient world — seeing their primary care provider or specialists. For the first time, this new module will begin to measure the quality of heart disease and stroke care by healthcare providers in the community. It focuses not only on patients who have a history of heart disease and stroke but also on preventing heart disease and stroke in those who have not yet had a first event.”

Bufalino, a cardiologist and president of Midwest Heart Specialists, a 50+-physician practice in Suburban Chicago, has been involved with the Get With The Guidelines hospital program since its inception. His practice has been testing and using a program similar to the outpatient module for about eight years.

“If you had asked the physicians in my practice 10 years ago how we were doing in providing quality care for our patients, they would have responded that we were doing very well,” Bufalino said. “Then, we measured what we were doing according to national guidelines of care and found out we had room for improvement.”

“A decade later, the practice has gone from being in the 70th percentile of performance to being one of the top practices in the country, in the 90th percentile and above in almost every parameter of care for heart disease and stroke that we measure.”

As part of the outpatient module, healthcare providers receive feedback, similar to a report card, regarding their care for patients in preventing and treating heart disease and stroke. The Get With The Guidelines database will also give providers a benchmark of where they are compared to a national database of others involved in primary and secondary prevention of heart disease and stroke.

The module measures how providers perform on key indicators of quality, such as: whether a patient’s cholesterol and blood pressure are being managed effectively; if diabetes is controlled; and whether the patient has been prescribed smoking cessation, exercise and other health-related behaviors.

The use of electronic health records (EHR) will be a key component of the initiative. Using Get With The Guidelines-Outpatient, providers can electronically report on the care they provide individual patients.

The program will be compatible with a variety of EHR vendors and can ease the burden of duplicate data entry in the office setting, as well as reduce costly errors. The robust national database that results would also be a rich resource for research.

“The Get With The Guidelines-Outpatient module will close the loop of research and transparency from the hospital to outpatient care,” Bufalino said. “Now we will not only know if hospitals are providing evidence-based care for heart disease and stroke patients, but also if the providers who continue that care in the community are doing all they can to keep patients as heart healthy as possible.”

The need for quality improvement programs is well established, with more than 16.8 million adult Americans with a history of coronary artery disease and more than 900,000 having new or recurrent heart attacks each year. At age 40 or older, 18 percent of men and 23 percent of women who have their first heart attack will die within a year after the attack.

“Much of heart disease can be prevented by following evidenced-based guidelines for care,” Bufalino said. “Research shows that hospitals participating in Get With The Guidelines can achieve better patient outcomes. Now we can help providers and their patients see that same kind of improved care in the office setting.”

To learn more about Get With The Guidelines-Outpatient and other American Heart Association quality improvement initiatives, visit www.americanheart.org/getwiththeguidelines  and www.americanheart.org/outpatient.  

Inaugural support for Get With The Guidelines-Outpatient is provided by Pfizer, Medtronic and Merck Schering Plough Pharmaceuticals.

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The American Heart Association receives funding primarily from individuals; foundations and corporations (including pharmaceutical, device manufacturers and other companies) also make donations and fund specific association programs and events. The association has strict policies to prevent these relationships from influencing the science content. Revenues from pharmaceutical and device corporations are available at www.americanheart.org/corporatefunding.  

 QI09-1004 (GWTG-OP/Bufalino)