American Heart Association Joins Hospital Quality Programs to Improve Cardiac and Respiratory Outcomes

DALLAS, Nov. 4, 2010 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The American Heart Association has merged two of its premier quality improvement programs to help providers reduce disability and death from in-hospital cardiac and respiratory emergencies. Get With The Guidelines^®-Resuscitation – a combination of the association's National Registry of CardioPulmonary Resuscitation (NRCPR^®) and Get With The Guidelines^® – will arm hospitals with proven methods for providing evidence-based care, benchmarking and quality improvement.

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The new initiative will focus on tools and information to help providers better follow the AHA's 2010 Guidelines for Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) and Emergency Cardiovascular Care (ECC), released in October.

"The mission of the NRCPR hospital safety program was to reduce disability and death from cardiac and respiratory emergencies by providing an evidence-based, quality improvement program of patient safety, medical emergency team response, effective resuscitation and post-emergency care," said Beth Mancini, R.N., Ph.D., chair of the Get With The Guidelines- Resuscitation Science Advisory Board. "We are thrilled to be joining forces with the association's other recognized quality improvement programs. With the release of our new guidelines for CPR and ECC, it's an extremely effective way to provide tools hospitals need to effectively and efficiently implement the 2010 guidelines. The outcome, we believe, is that more lives will be saved."

The Get With The Guidelines quality suite puts up-to-date treatment guidelines, tools and resources to work to help ensure consistent application of the most recent scientific guidelines for patient treatment. The program includes in-hospital modules for heart failure, stroke and outpatient practices – and now for resuscitation.

Launched by the American Heart Association in 1999, the NRCPR is a database of in-hospital resuscitation events from more than 500 hospitals. The data gives participating hospitals feedback on their resuscitation practice and patient outcomes and can be used to develop new evidence-based guidelines for in-hospital resuscitation.

By mid-2010, 183,749 cardiopulmonary resuscitation events were in the registry, said Mancini, a professor, associate dean and chair of undergraduate nursing programs at the University of Texas at Arlington College of Nursing.

More than 30 research studies using the data have been published in leading medical journals, with outcomes data that can often lead to change in patient care and outcomes delivery.

"Putting clinical registries to work as the engines of quality improvement is a transformational event in healthcare, and Get With The Guidelines-Resuscitation is no exception," said Lee H. Schwamm, M.D., chair of the Get With The Guidelines National Steering Committee and professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

"Drawing on the strengths of the prior work of the NRCPR, Get With the Guidelines-Resuscitation puts the American Heart Association's high-impact suite of quality improvement interventions and strategies into the workflow of care for patients who experience cardiac arrest," he said. "Shortening the time to effective resuscitation and maximizing post-resuscitation care is critical to patient survival. Bringing this approach under the Get With The Guidelines umbrella makes good sense for patients, providers and hospitals."

Get With The Guidelines-Resuscitation will provide expanded clinical support from a nationwide network of American Heart Association quality improvement professionals. It will also include access to the Web-based Patient Management Tool®, powered by Outcome Sciences, Inc., for data abstraction and reporting. Other benefits of the merger are access to expanded training and support, including an online toolkit, webinars and teleconferences, as well as real-time benchmarking.

"The impact of Get With The Guidelines is most profound in the hospital setting, where it helps hospitals change the systems of care delivery to ensure that patients receive all the evidenced-based care for which they are eligible," Schwamm said. "We are confident that Get With The Guidelines-Resuscitation will further expand the opportunities for improvement in healthcare delivery, and that it will produce measurable differences in the numbers of patients who receive the best care that medicine can provide."

The American Heart Association/American Stroke Association receives funding mostly from individuals. Foundations and corporations donate as well, and fund specific programs and events. Strict policies are enforced to prevent these relationships from influencing the association's science content. Financial information for the American Heart Association, including a list of contributions from pharmaceutical companies and device manufacturers, is available at www.heart.org/corporatefunding.

QI 10-1001 (GWTG-R/Mancini/Schwamm)

Additional resources:

• To learn more about Get With The Guidelines, visit www.heart.org/quality.
• Downloadable stock footage, animation, and our image gallery are located at www.heart.org/news under Multimedia.
• Stay up to date on the latest news from American Heart Association scientific meetings, including Scientific Sessions 2010, by following us at www.twitter.com/heartnews. We will be tweeting from the conference using hashtag #AHA10News.
• OUTCOME is the leading provider of patient registries, studies, quality improvement programs and integrated technologies for evaluating real-world outcomes. The company has designed and implemented more than 200 patient registries, including many of the largest and most well recognized programs for disease outcomes and patient safety. Outcome's Patient Management Tool® provides a simple and intuitive, Web-based system for measuring the quality of clinical care. For more information, visit www.outcome.com.

SOURCE American Heart Association