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(Circulation. 2006;113:607-608.)
© 2006 American Heart Association, Inc.

Editorial

Coming Together to Achieve Quality Cardiovascular Care

Pamela S. Douglas, MD, FACC, FAHA^*; Robert H. Eckel, MD, FAHA; Darryl T. Gray, MD, SCD; Jerod M. Loeb, PhD; Barry M. Straube, MD^||

*President, American College of Cardiology, Bethesda, Maryland, and the Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina.
President, American Heart Association, Dallas, Texas, and the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, Denver, Colorado.
Medical Officer, Center for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Rockville, Maryland.
Executive Vice President, Division of Research, Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, Oakbrook Terrace, Illinois.
||Acting Chief Medical Officer and Director, Office of Clinical Standards and Quality, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Baltimore, Maryland.

Address correspondence to: Dr Pamela S. Douglas, American College of Cardiology, c/o Cathy Lora, 9111 Old Georgetown Road, Bethesda, Maryland 20814-1699.

An extract of the first 250 words of the full text is provided, because this article has no abstract.

Agreement on the processes of health care that are necessary to achieve healthcare quality goals is the foundation of performance measurement. In addition, standardization of performance measures themselves is essential to avoid confusion and undue burden among those whose performance is being measured. Recent work on cardiovascular performance measures establishes a new standard for how those agreements can be achieved and maintained among multiple stakeholders. The collaboration among the American College of Cardiology (ACC), the American Heart Association (AHA), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO), and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) serves as a useful model for how to reduce the burden of measure development, endorsement for public reporting, and implementation for quality improvement and accountability.

Article p 732

The collaboration started in 1993 when the ACC lent its support to an effort by CMS (then the Health Care Financing Administration) to develop objective performance measures based on the ACC/AHA Guideline on the Early Management of Patients With Acute Myocardial Infarction. Those measures were used to track inpatient care, first at the state level¹ and then at the national level.^2,3 The ACC and AHA also supported measure development efforts by the JCAHO for its new requirement that hospitals measure performance.

In 2000, as the ACC was developing the Guideline Applied in Practice (GAP) program and the AHA was developing Get With the Guidelines (GWTG), both organizations recognized the need for a common set of measures to . . . [Full Text of this Article]