Healthy Hearts in the Heartland

Summary

This study evaluates the ability of small primary care practices to 1) implement point-of-care and population management quality improvement strategies to improve cardiovascular quality of care (e.g., clinical decision support, patient education and counseling, or referral to smoking quit lines), and 2) implement the PopHealth performance measurement software to evaluate performance on the ABCS (aspirin when appropriate, blood pressure control, cholesterol management, and when applicable, smoking cessation) and allow regional benchmarking. This minimal risk study is a practice-randomized trial to determine a) whether point of care strategies improve ABCS performance measures compared to baseline, and b) whether adding locally tailored population management strategies to POC strategies improves performance on the ABCS measures more than POC strategies alone.

Conditions

• Cardiovascular Diseases

Interventions

OTHER

Point of Care

Practice facilitators will work with practices to implement strategies to improve ABCS care during the patient encounter. Some examples of these types of quality improvement initiatives are electronic reminders and clinical decision support to prescribe aspirin or a statin at the time of a visit, improving how your practice collects blood pressure measures to increase clinicians' willingness to act on readings, or electronic reminders for nursing staff that there is no lipid panel in record and have a standing order to act on this.

OTHER

Population Management

Practice Facilitators will work with practices to both implement Point of Care strategies as well as population management strategies. These practices will use their EHR and/or receive training to use the popHealth software package, which works with data from the EHR, to generate lists of high-risk patients that need outreach for one of the ABCS domains (such as conducting outreach to patients who are not on aspirin who would benefit from this therapy). Practices in this arm will receive the opportunity to link to community resources such as pharmacists who could assist patients with medication management or tobacco quit lines through the HealtheRx program.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)

  collaborator FED

• Alliance of Chicago Community Health Services

  collaborator OTHER

• American Medical Association

  collaborator OTHER

• Illinois Department of Public Health

  collaborator OTHER

• MetaStar, Inc.

  collaborator INDUSTRY

• Northern Illinois University

  collaborator OTHER

• Northwestern Medical Group

  collaborator OTHER

• Purdue University

  collaborator OTHER

• Telligen, Inc.

  collaborator INDUSTRY

• University of Chicago

  collaborator OTHER

• Northwestern University

  lead OTHER

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

HEALTH_SERVICES_RESEARCH

Masking

NONE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Max Age

89 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2016-01-31

Primary Completion

2018-05-31

Completion

2018-12-31

Countries

• United States

Study Locations