HHS www.hhs.gov just awarded $112 million to regional cooperatives to work with 5,000 primary care professionals in 12 states to improve the heart health of nearly eight million patients. These awards are aligned with the Department’s “Million Hearts” National initiative to prevent heart attacks and stroke.
To help heart and stroke patients, the AHRQ research initiative “EvidenceNOW: Advancing Heart Health in Primary Care” www.ahrq.gov/evidencenow.html is in place to transform healthcare delivery by building the critical infrastructure needed to help smaller primary care practices improve care for patients with heart issues.
Smaller practices very often do not have internal resources for quality improvement and are not always able to apply the latest medical research to the heart healthcare they provide. The EvidenceNow initiative is aligned with HHS and the Million Hearts http://millionhearts.hhs.gov program.
The EvidenceNow initiative established seven regional cooperatives with multidisciplinary teams of experts in each regional cooperative to help improve quality for up to 300 smaller primary care practices.
The seven cooperatives include Midwest Cooperative, New York City Cooperative, North Carolina Cooperative, Northwest Cooperative, Oklahoma Cooperative, Southwest Cooperative, and the Virginia Cooperative.
Services at the cooperatives include onsite coaching, consulting with experts to improve ways to deliver care and share best practices utilizing EHR support. The goal is to provide the best cardiovascular prevention advice such as the use of aspirin, how to best control blood pressure and cholesterol, and how to get patients to stop smoking.
In addition, an eighth grant will go to the Oregon Health Sciences University www.ohsu.edu to conduct an independent external evaluation of the overall EvidenceNOW initiative. The team will study the impact of EvidenceNOW intervention on practice improvement and the delivery of cardiovascular care. The team will also study which practice supports and quality improvement strategies are most effective in improving the implementation of new evidence.