American Heart Association helping countries all over the world provide better care
The American Heart Association (AHA) is working with healthcare systems in developing and emerging countries to establish standardized processes for treating heart attacks, strokes and heart failure. The effort is aimed at translating established clinical guidelines into consistent bedside care.
Damodhar Suresh, MD, executive medical director of the St. Elizabeth Healthcare Heart and Vascular Institute in Edgewood, Kentucky, and volunteer science chair for the AHA’s International Committee, discussed the initiative during sessions at ESC Congress 2026 in Munich. He also spoke with Cardiovascular Business to share additional details.
Suresh explained that AHA’s systems-of-care approach is designed to create standardized pathways covering the entire patient journey, from initial presentation through hospitalization and discharge. Such systems are the norm in the United States and other developed healthcare markets, but they remain less common in many other parts of the world. He said many hospitals still do not have a clearly established set of rules for how heart attack or stroke patients are treated, for example, which leads to lower survival rates and poorer outcomes.
“Good physicians are great all over the world,” Suresh said. “It’s just that they may not have the same system of care that we have.”
Over the past five years, the AHA has helped establish systems of care in more than a dozen regions all over the world. The efforts include heart attack and stroke systems in India, heart failure centers in Japan and various initiatives in Mexico and Argentina.
India has become a major focus because changing how patients are treated could have a massive impact on that country's vast population. At Mahatma Gandhi Mission Hospital in Mumbai, the AHA-supported system established a standardized process for patients presenting with heart attacks and strokes. For a heart attack patient, for example, the pathway includes obtaining an ECG within 10 minutes, standardizing the process for moving the patient to the catheterization laboratory and establishing consistent medication protocols at discharge.
Suresh said the program has already demonstrated a mortality benefit during its first year, illustrating how system-level management changes can improve outcomes, even without changing the medical treatments.
These systems of care are now being implemented in larger hospitals across India. Suresh said the scale of the Indian healthcare system means these programs could eventually help tens of millions of patients.
The broader initiative reflects a shift from simply publishing clinical guidelines to creating infrastructure that helps healthcare providers consistently implement them. Guidelines from organizations such as the the AHA, American College of Cardiology and European Society of Cardiology provide evidence-based recommendations, but their impact depends on whether hospitals have processes to put those recommendations into practice.
Dave Fornell has covered healthcare for more than 17 years, with a focus in cardiology and radiology. Fornell is a 5-time winner of a Jesse H. Neal Award, the most prestigious editorial honors in the field of specialized journalism. The wins included best technical content, best use of social media and best COVID-19 coverage. Fornell was also a three-time Neal finalist for best range of work by a single author. He produces more than 100 editorial videos each year, most of them interviews with key opinion leaders in medicine. He also writes technical articles, covers key trends, conducts video hospital site visits, and is very involved with social media. E-mail: [email protected]