ACC/AHA Clinical Performance Measures

Medicine is experiencing an unprecedented focus on quantifying and improving health care quality. The American College of Cardiology (ACC) and the American Heart Association (AHA) have developed a multi-faceted strategy to facilitate the process of improving clinical care. The initial phase of this effort was to create clinical practice guidelines that carefully review and synthesize available evidence to better guide patient care. Such guidelines are written in a spirit of suggesting diagnostic or therapeutic interventions for patients in most circumstances. Accordingly, significant judgment by clinicians is required to adapt these guidelines to the care of individual patients, and these guidelines can be generated with varying degrees of confidence based upon available evidence.
Occasionally, the evidence supporting a particular structural aspect or process of care is so strong that failure to perform such actions reduces the likelihood that optimal patient outcomes will occur. Creating a mechanism for quantifying these opportunities to improve the outcomes of care is an important and pressing challenge/.../