The UAB Cardiovascular Institute (CVI) received the American Heart Association’s Get With The Guidelines® – Heart Failure Gold Plus award. This quality achievement award recognizes UAB Medicine’s commitment to improving the care and outcomes for patients with heart failure.
Get With The Guidelines is an American Heart Association program that connects hospitals with research-based guidelines and measurement tools that can improve the quality of care for patients with heart failure. With a focus on areas such as stroke care, cardiovascular conditions, and resuscitation, the program encourages providers to consistently follow the latest treatment guidelines.
Put more simply, the goal is to increase patients’ healthy days and reduce hospital readmissions. It also means providing education that helps patients manage their heart failure at home.
A common condition
Heart failure (HF) is a condition in which the heart cannot keep up with its workload. In some cases, the heart cannot fill up with enough blood. In other cases, it cannot pump blood with enough force to effectively reach the rest of the body. HF can affect one or both sides of the heart. It develops over time and usually is caused by other conditions that damage the heart, such as coronary heart disease, diabetes, and high blood pressure.
An estimated 6.7 million adults in the United States are living with HF, and that number is expected to pass 8 million by 2030. There’s no cure for it, but patients can improve their quality life by working with their health care team on a disease-management plan that may include medication, symptom monitoring, and lifestyle changes such as diet and exercise.
Hospital-wide effort
In an effort to earn the Association’s Gold Plus award, the UAB CVI launched a plan across multiple medical specialties to fully adopt the Get With The Guidelines program. Vera Bittner, M.D., section chief of General Cardiology and medical director of the Interventional Cardiovascular Unit at UAB Medicine, says the award is the result of a successful, hospital-wide collaboration.
“We knew that American Heart Association guideline-directed medical therapy correlates with better outcomes for our patients, so every group of clinicians involved in these patients’ care went the extra mile,” Dr. Bittner said. “This effort involved cardiologists, hospitalists, internists, advanced practice providers, Emergency Medicine, ambulatory clinics, nursing units, Pharmacy, dietitians, telehealth, Health System Information Services, care coordinators, case managers, and social workers.”
The team developed standardized order sets, progress note templates, and educational materials. It also created a streamlined process for referring patients from inpatient to outpatient care by starting a discharge clinic for patients with HF.
Following the guidelines
Dr. Bittner says Association-backed guidelines provide specific standards that help guide providers in caring for patients.
“Are we assessing cardiac function? Are we prescribing medications shown to improve prognosis? Are we getting educational materials to patients and families to help them care for themselves after discharge? Are patients with acute HF getting outpatient follow-up within seven days of discharge? The Gold Plus award from the American Heart Association specifically indicates that our teams met these and numerous other guideline benchmarks, and we take great pride in that. Most significantly, it means our patients are getting the best possible care,” Dr. Bittner said.
UAB Medicine’s Heart Failure Program received additional recognition with the Association’s Target: Heart Failure and Target: Type 2 Diabetes Honor Roll awards. These further reflect the hospital’s performance in ensuring that patients with HF receive helpful information at discharge, based on Get With The Guidelines data.
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