Get With The Guidelines^®

Outcome provides the Patient Management Tool^® system for the award-winning American Heart Association and the American Stroke Association Get With The Guidelines® programs. Get With The Guidelines is a program that helps ensure consistent application of the most recent American Heart Association/American Stroke Association scientific guidelines for patient treatment. The program includes in-hospital modules for heart failure, stroke, and resuscitation as well as a module for outpatient practices.

Your hospital can choose to participate in any combination of these programs. With more than 2,000 hospitals participating and more than two million patients enrolled, the Get With The Guidelines programs are estimated to be able to save more than 80,000 people annually if 75% of the eligible patients discharged are treated at an 85% compliance rate with the AHA/ACC Secondary Prevention guidelines.

These programs begin with an assessment of your hospital's current acute treatment and discharge protocols. This assessment will provide a baseline against which you will compare your future results and measure your success. By using the program’s tools, you can achieve continuous quality improvements in your acute treatment and discharge procedures. These tools are easy to use and will assist you in addressing each patient’s needs. Get With The Guidelines is based on the American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association prevention guidelines for cardiovascular disease. Get With The Guidelines focuses on interventions such as:

Smoking cessation counseling
Lipid lowering therapy
ACE inhibitor use
Blood Pressure Treatment
Beta Blocker use
Weight and exercise management
Diabetes Management
Arial Fibrillation Management
Aspirin or other Antithrombotic medication

The Get With The Guidelines Patient Management Tool^® applications are easy-to-use web-based tools. The tools are online, interactive assessment and reporting systems that aid in Get With The Guidelines program implementation. The tools provide patient-specific American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association guideline information and enable each institution to track its adherence to the guidelines individually and against the AHA’s national benchmarks over time.

The Patient Management Tool application is an important part of implementing Get With The Guidelines–Heart Failure, Stroke, and Resuscitation programs because it helps hospital care teams manage each patient to the guidelines and reduces missed cases. These tools have demonstrated effectiveness in improving hospital compliance rates with guidelines.

These programs also include technical support from the Outcome help desk and one-on-one support from the American Heart Association field staff.

Continuity of Care Record (CCR)

Outcome offers Continuity of Care Record (CCR) functionality in all of its programs. The CCR makes health information portable and transferable by and for the patient. The CCR is a standard specification being developed jointly by ASTM International, the Massachusetts Medical Society (MMS), the Health Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS), the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), and the American Academy of Pediatrics. The addition of the CCR to the Get With The Guidelines programs is intended to foster and improve the continuity of patient care, reduce medical errors, and assure at least a minimum standard of health information transportability when a patient is referred or transferred to another provider.

The CCR is being developed in response to the need to organize and make transportable a set of basic patient information consisting of the most relevant and timely facts about a patient's condition. These include patient information, patient's health status (e.g., allergies, medications, vital signs, diagnoses, recent procedures), and recent care provided. The patient’s CCR can be exported in the standard XML format and this document can be shared electronically with other electronic health record (EHR) systems or viewed and printed in PDF format. The patient may receive this document for his/her personal files or to be shared with another clinician responsible for follow-up care.

Recognition

Hospitals participating in Get With The Guidelines that demonstrate high performance are eligible to receive Performance Achievement Awards.

Awards

In 2002, Get With The Guidelines received a CMS Common Knowledge Award from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

In 2004, Get With The Guidelines was the first hospital-based program to receive the prestigious Innovation in Prevention Award from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

In 2007, Get With The Guidelines received the Inaugural eHealth Initiative (eHI) Award, honoring leadership in healthcare quality through health IT for transforming care delivery.

Learn More

Visit the AHA website at www.heart.org for additional information or join a demo to see for yourself how these programs can benefit your hospital. We host an online demo every Tuesday at 11am EST and every Thursday at 4pm EST. Contact us at support@outcome.com to join a demo.