Preventing heart attacks and strokes: data is not enough, it has to be easy to act on
- Into-Action.Health
- Jul 31
- 2 min read
We can see the problem easily enough, not least through CVDPREVENT, the national audit. We see that large numbers of patients who need preventive treatments do not receive them. And despite being awash with data in primary care, the best we have seen over the years is marginal improvement. Digital tools are in widespread use in primary care and they can provide useful insights, help standardise care with templates and protocols, monitor targets and contracts and support clinical decision making.
But there are some fundamental gaps:
** Widespread reliance on single indicator searches that serve narrow QOF targets but don't address the multiple risk factors that most patients have, and don’t focus on the interventions with greatest impact.
** Searches that generate lists of patients requiring action, but without the pathways or capacity to absorb the work.
** Software that adds electronic alerts to flag patients who need attention but which get lost in the blur of other flags there is no time to act on.
** Population health management platforms that tell you everything you might need to know about your population, but are too complex for busy clinicians to navigate and make use of.
The real-world challenge in primary care is not the data, but having the capacity and ways of working to act on the data. And the CVDACTION Impact Modelling shows us the cost of this inaction with around 20,000 avoidable heart attacks, strokes, heart failure and kidney failure episodes every year. You can find your ICB’s impact data here www.into-action.health/impactreport
CVDACTION has been designed to complement existing tools by addressing these fundamental gaps. It brings together the major cardiovascular-kidney-metabolic conditions, identifies all patients with one or more of these conditions who is not receiving NICE recommended treatments (including the CVD MSF priorities), and makes it easy for clinicians to see the whole picture and to prioritise, to tackle multiple risk factors at the same time and to target health inequalities, with manageable lists of patients to fit workflow.
Visit www.into-action.health to learn more.
Comments