Clinical InvestigationCoronary Artery DiseaseAre quality improvements associated with the Get With the Guidelines-Coronary Artery Disease (GWTG-CAD) program sustained over time?: A longitudinal comparison of GWTG-CAD hospitals versus non–GWTG-CAD hospitals
Section snippets
GWTG-CAD program
Details of the GWTG Program have been previously published.9 In brief, the AHA launched the GWTG initiative focused on the redesign of hospital systems of care to improve the quality of care of patients with CAD, stroke, and heart failure. The GWTG-CAD program includes learning sessions, didactic sessions, best practice sharing, interactive workshops, postmeeting follow-up, and a Web-based patient management tool (Outcome, Cambridge, MA). This Web-based tool provides the opportunity for
Results
The process by which hospitals were chosen for the study is presented in Figure 1. Overall, about 4,000 hospitals were identified in the Hospital Compare database during each 12-month period. About 7% of hospitals were excluded because of missing covariates in the GWTG database or the American Hospitals Association Annual Survey. To achieve data stability and reliability, we also excluded hospitals with less than 10 AMI admissions in each 12-month period. A total of 440, 439, and 429 GWTG-CAD
Discussion
GWTG-CAD is a collaborative performance improvement program of the AHA that aims to improve quality of care and clinical outcomes of patients hospitalized with CAD. Using the national CMS Hospital Compare data, we found that hospitals participating in GWTG-CAD hospitals had modestly higher overall acute cardiac care and secondary prevention guideline adherence relative to non–GWTG-CAD hospitals. In addition, these benefits associated with GWTG participation were sustained for 3 consecutive
Disclosures
GWTG-CAD is a program of the American Heart Association (Dallas, TX) and is supported in part by an unrestricted educational grant from Merck/Schering-Plough Pharmaceutical (White House Station, NJ) and Pfizer (New York, NY). The analysis of registry data was performed at Duke Clinical Research Institute (Durham, NC), which receives funding from the American Heart Association. The sponsors were not involved in the design, analysis, preparation, review, or approval of this manuscript.
Ying Xian,
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Comparison of performance on Hospital Compare process measures and patient outcomes between hospitals that do and do not participate in Acute Coronary Treatment and Intervention Outcomes Network Registry-Get with the Guidelines
2016, American Heart JournalCitation Excerpt :We found very high performance in these Hospital Compare metrics in both ACTION Registry–GWTG and nonparticipating hospitals. Prior studies of the GWTG QI program found that participating hospitals maintained modest superiority in measure performance over nonparticipating hospitals6 and that GWTG hospitals with >85% achievement of quality measures had lower 30-day myocardial infarction mortality.7 Nevertheless, in this more contemporary study, we found similar Hospital Compare process measure performance and outcomes between ACTION Registry–GWTG participants and nonparticipants.
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