CVDACTION: Transforming the prevention of cardiovascular disease
The challenge
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of avoidable mortality in our most deprived communities 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 change, but also through the treatment of six high-risk conditions: atrial fibrillation, high blood pressure (hypertension), high cholesterol, diabetes, non-diabetic hyperglycaemia (pre-diabetes) and chronic kidney disease.
However, there is widespread and longstanding under treatment in these conditions. For example, 40% of people with hypertension are not receiving optimal treatment, and 1 in 5 people with CVD are not on any lipid lowering therapy. UCLPartners Size of the Prize shows that if blood pressure and cholesterol optimisation rates were improved to realistic ambition levels, thousands of heart attacks and strokes would be prevented in England in three years, with millions of pounds being saved. Optimising treatment in the other high-risk conditions would prevent even greater numbers of these catastrophic events.
Read Dr Matt Kearney’s blog on why it is time for a step change in CVD prevention, and how this can be achieved.
A solution: CVDACTION
CVDACTION is a smart data tool developed by UCLPartners and designed to support GP practices and Primary Care Networks (PCNs) to deliver a step change in preventive care – in order to prevent heart attacks and strokes at scale. CVDACTION brings together all the key metrics for CVD prevention in one place, integrating the results of around 85 searches into user friendly, highly actionable dashboards, in order to display gaps, opportunities and inequalities in preventive care. CVDACTION mirrors the national audit, CVDprevent, but in addition provides GP practices with patient identifiable information so that clinicians can act on the data to prioritise and optimise care where needed.
The CVDACTION dashboards are designed to help clinicians take a holistic approach by addressing multiple conditions in individual patients. CVDACTION also supports targeted action on health inequalities: all results can be filtered by deprivation, ethnicity, severe mental illness and learning disability so that opportunities for improvement in specific populations can be spotlighted.
The CVDACTION dashboards include embedded resources and helpful links to support teams in optimising clinical care and in providing structured support for patient education, self-management and behaviour change.
Watch an introduction to CVDACTION:
Explore the CVDACTION tool
Access and explore the CVDACTION tool (this is a working version with dummy data).
View more CVDACTION videos on You Tube, including a demonstration of the system.
Pathway optimisation
CVDACTION complements the existing UCLPartners Proactive Care Frameworks and will enable smarter use of data to identify, stratify and prioritise patients whose preventive treatment needs improving. In the CVDACTION demonstrator sites, PCNs will be provided with additional implementation support to help them transform pathways of care in order to deliver a step change in in improvement:
- Clinical optimisation – delivered by nurse, pharmacist or GP, starting with those with greatest need or risk.
- Broader proactive care to optimise support for education, self-management and behaviour change. This can be provided by a member of the wider primary care team such healthcare assistant, health coach, link worker or care coordinator. The UCLPartners Proactive Care Frameworks offer a wide range of free resources to help team members to deliver these interventions and optimise care.
Demonstration site support
A Future Forum page has been created, which contains all the supporting information 2023/34 demonstrator sites may need. Please speak to a member of the UCLPartners CVDACTION team if you are unable to access this page.
Terms and conditions of use
UCLPartners’ CVDACTION data tool has been created by UCLPartners and are proprietary to UCLPartners.
By downloading and running/using the UCLPartners CVDACTION search queries and/or dashboards (whether on SystmOne, EMIS, Tableau and/ or PowerBI) users:
- Confirm that CVDACTION will be used in accordance with any instructions and licences supplied by UCLPartners.
- Confirm you understand the clinical criteria on which the dashboards are based.
- Confirm you understand that CVDACTION can only identify those patients who have been correctly coded into the Electronic Health Record. UCLPartners is not responsible for primary care health record coding.
- Confirm you will acknowledge UCLPartners in any communications with third parties and the public regarding CVDACTION or data/outputs from CVDACTION.
- Confirm that except to the extent our liability cannot be excluded by law, you assume full responsibility for all decision and consequences of implementing the CVDACTION tools along with the wider resources.
- Confirm that you will not use or exploit these tools for research or commercial gain without permission from UCLPartners.
Right of use and replication
Subject to your agreement of the terms and conditions of use, and the Disclaimer above, we grant you non-exclusive and non-transferrable licence to use the CVDACTION dashboards. Where CVDACTION is integrated with other data systems (e.g., population health management systems) it may only be replicated in its exact appearance and functionality; all use of CVDACTION by any party must adhere to the brand guidelines, unless otherwise agreed. Any instances where CVDACTION branding is not applied appropriately will be considered misuse. If Users wish to incorporate other logos/ branding into the CVDACTION dashboards, agreement must be sought from UCLPartners
Development
CVDACTION has been developed by UCLPartners in collaboration with the Health Economics Unit (Midlands and Lancashire Commissioning Support Unit) and VizDJ, and with unrestricted grant funding from AstraZeneca and Boehringer Ingelheim. Industry funders have had no involvement in or influence over the design or specification of CVDACTION.
All feedback and suggestions from the 23/24 Demonstrator sites related to the set up and use of CVDACTION will be recorded & reviewed at the end of the year by a Clinical and Implementation reference group. This will inform the commission of future adaptations with the aim of improving the user experience.
To provide user feedback about CVDACTION or submit a change request, please contact cvdaction@uclpartners.com
CVDACTION dashboard demonstration
We are running a series of CVDACTION dashboard demonstrations – find out more and sign-up.
Contact the CVDACTION team
If you have a question about CVDACTION, please contact the UCLPartners team on CVDACTION@uclpartners.com