Cardiovascular health societies share new performance and quality measures for PAD management
The American College of Cardiology (ACC) and American Heart Association (AHA) have published a new guidance designed to help care teams diagnose and manage peripheral artery disease (PAD). The document centers around seven performance measures and eight quality measures that cover every step of the patient’s care journey, from initial testing to treatment and lifestyle modifications.
“Ensuring that PAD treatments are provided with the highest quality requires measures that accurately evaluate PAD care as well as the environment in which care is delivered,” wrote first author Philip P. Goodney, MD, MS, a vascular surgeon with Dartmouth Health and chair of the writing committee, and colleagues. “These measures will help patients, clinicians, researchers, quality assurance personnel, payers and regulatory agencies evaluate PAD care similarly and properly focus attention toward ensuring that high-quality, high-value care is delivered to all patients.”
Four performance measures and five quality measures from the document are brand new, highlighting how much additional ground the writing committee wanted to cover with this update. The new performance measures focus on blood pressure management, diabetes management, the use of ACE inhibitors and antithrombotic therapy. The new quality measures, meanwhile, focus on preventive foot care, lipid lowering, evaluating health disparities, saphenous vein assessment prior to revascularization, and multidisciplinary treatments for chronic limb-threatening ischemia (CLTI).
Health disparities, the writing committee wrote, are expected to play a critical role in the development of all future guidelines and measures associated with PAD.
“Assessing the comprehensive effect of these disparities on treatments and interventions is much more complex than follow-up visits after a clinical trial,” the authors wrote. “Understanding the impact of therapies will require the use of health services research and the implementation of scientific methodologies to understand the intersection between therapies and social determinants of health. For instance, for many patients who undergo amputation, the challenges at hand are not an absence of known evidence-based care recommendations, but rather challenges in healthcare access and treatment adherence prior to amputation. Implementation science is a rapidly evolving field that emphasizes a better understanding of the design and execution of population-based interventions, which may help improve the effectiveness of care delivery.”
Artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies, they added, are sure to provide value in the future as tools that can help close gaps in patient care and lead to improved outcomes.
Click here to read the full document in JACC.
The American Association of Cardiovascular and Pulmonary Rehabilitation, American Podiatric Medical Association, Association of Black Cardiologists, Society for Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions, Society for Vascular Medicine, Society for Vascular Nursing, Society for Vascular Surgery, Society of Interventional Radiology and Vascular and Endovascular Surgery Society all participated in the development of these performance and quality measures.
Michael has more than 19 years of experience as a professional writer and editor. He has written at length about cardiology, radiology, artificial intelligence and other key healthcare topics.