Healthy Hearts in the Heartland

Overview

This study evaluates the ability of small primary care practices to 1) implement point-of-care and population management quality improvement strategies to improve cardiovascular quality of care (e.g., clinical decision support, patient education and counseling, or referral to smoking quit lines), and 2) implement the PopHealth performance measurement software to evaluate performance on the ABCS (aspirin when appropriate, blood pressure control, cholesterol management, and when applicable, smoking cessation) and allow regional benchmarking. This minimal risk study is a practice-randomized trial to determine a) whether point of care strategies improve ABCS performance measures compared to baseline, and b) whether adding locally tailored population management strategies to POC strategies improves performance on the ABCS measures more than POC strategies alone.

The investigators specific aims are to: 1. Evaluate the ability of small practices in the investigators region to 1) implement point-of-care (POC) and population management (PM) quality improvement strategies to improve the ABCS, and 2) implement the popHealth quality measurement software to evaluate performance on the ABCS and allow regional benchmarking. 2. Conduct a practice-randomized trial to determine a) whether POC strategies improve ABCS performance measures (i.e. aspirin prescribing, blood pressure control, cholesterol management, and smoking cessation counseling) compared to baseline, and b) whether adding locally-tailored PM strategies to POC strategies improves performance on the ABCS measures more than POC strategies alone. 3. Deploy an open source quality measurement platform (popHealth) to establish a regional QI benchmark based on participating practice ABCS measures and enable longitudinal tracking of electronic clinical quality measures (eCQMs) across the investigators region. The investigators will perform a mixed-methods evaluation to examine changes in practices' perceived capacity for quality improvement and whether access to comparative quality data within a region improves the capacity of practices to sustain their quality improvement program around the ABCS and provides a long-term framework for practices to implement new QI activities.