Background
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) causes a quarter of all deaths in England and accounts for a fifth of the life expectancy gap between people living in the most affluent areas compared to those living in the most deprived.
CVD is also highly preventable, not just through lifestyle changes but also through the treatment of high-risk conditions that include atrial fibrillation, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, non-diabetic hyperglycaemia (pre-diabetes) and chronic kidney disease.
Despite robust evidence showing that using NICE recommended treatments in these conditions is highly effective at preventing heart attacks and strokes, under treatment is widespread and longstanding. This is partly because managing these conditions is not easy in real world primary care consultations where multi-morbidity, complexity and time pressure is the norm.
CVDACTION
The challenge is not having data … but having data we can action.
We are often awash with data in primary care. But data is of limited value if we don’t have the capacity to act on it.
CVDACTION bridges the gap between data and action in real world primary care. It is designed to make it much easier for clinicians to spot people at high risk of CVD because they are not optimally treated with NICE recommended therapies. Optimising care in these patients will drive a step change in prevention of heart attacks and strokes.
CVDACTION is a smart data tool that brings together the key metrics for CVD prevention in one place. It shows you the gaps, opportunities and inequalities in preventive care so that you can plan your improvements, prioritise safely and fit workload to capacity.
For more information and a short video summary of CVDACTION click here.
CVDACTION provides teams with high quality data that is easy to action and time-saving in real world clinical practice.
- Complements CVDprevent, the national audit, with a focus on high impact treatments in high risk conditions.
- Takes comprehensive GP data across 85 indicators and integrates into simple dashboards at practice, PCN or system level – wherever GP data is stored. The search queries are built for EMIS, SystmOne and SQL.
- Identifies patients not receiving optimal treatments and stratifies to safely prioritise so that clinicians can have maximum impact and safely phase workload over time.
- Generates patient lists in manageable ‘chunks’ to fit capacity and workflow.
- Enables efficient co-morbid care, managing multiple risk factors in single consultations rather than multiple.
- Health inequality filters enable targeted CVD prevention in patients who are on suboptimal therapy and also at higher risk because of deprivation, ethnicity, severe mental illness or learning disability.
- Simple integrated CVDACTION guides help clinicians and non-clinicians to optimise treatment and wider proactive care, including support for education, self-management and behaviour change.