On a snowy Monday afternoon in Manhattan in 1949, 14 cardiovascular pioneers met in Franz Groedel’s office to form a revolutionary new society. Dedicated to the practicing physician, this group would devote itself to improving the quality of cardiovascular care by offering cardiologists education and other services.
Six decades later, their remarkable vision has resulted in the world’s leading advocate for quality cardiovascular care: the American College of Cardiology.
Lifelong Learning
The founders hoped to improve cardiovascular education for clinicians. The first meeting of the membership, the precursor to today’s Annual Scientific Session, took place in 1951 with 275 attendees. Just a few short years later, in the late 1950s, ACC educational programs drew as many as 2,500 attendees, a tribute to the founders’ plan.
By the 1960s, the College had expanded its educational mission worldwide, offering international circuit courses in more than 40 countries. As technology grew, the ACC took advantage of new delivery methods to ensure that even cardiologists who could not attend programs in person could benefit from outstanding ACC education through offerings like the ACCEL audio journal.
In 2001, the College launched its pioneering cardiovascular education Web site, Cardiosource. Today, CardioSource is your source for clinical content, education and ACC information online.
The founders’ vision for education has evolved into a thriving Lifelong Learning program designed to tailor cardiovascular education to the individual needs of the learner, taking learners from fellowship to retirement with live programs, digital learning, certification and recertification support, and more.
At the Heart of Health Policy
As the ACC grew, it became clear that to truly improve quality, the College would have to influence health policy. The ACC moved from New York to Bethesda, Md., in 1965 to be closer to the National Institutes of Health and the nation’s capital. Soon after, the College’s Government Relations Committee formed, and the ACC assumed an active role with legislators, advocating for physicians and their patients.
In 2006, the College moved to its current home at 2400 N Street in Washington, D.C., where a member-driven advocacy program brings the concerns of cardiovascular professionals and their patients to legislators on Capitol Hill and nationwide.
Putting Quality First
Beginning in the 1980s, the ACC emerged as a leader in determining quality care when it partnered with the American Heart Association to develop the first clinical practice guidelines. These guidelines took the best science and translated it to everyday practice.
In addition to building standards for care, the College was breaking new ground in measuring quality. In the 1990s, the ACC used the guidelines to lay the groundwork for studies documenting discrepancies in optimal care. The result was the earliest national clinical performance measures.
The launch of the National Cardiovascular Data Registry in 1997 allowed hospitals to benchmark the quality of care delivered in their cath labs. The natural next step: quality improvement programs. Beginning in 2001, the ACC began investing in Guidelines Applied in Practice (GAP) programs designed to help clinicians apply ACC/AHA guidelines at the point of care. The results of the Michigan GAP program, published in 2005, demonstrated a 21 percent to 26 percent improvement in mortality at 30 days and one year post-MI. In 2006, more than 1,000 hospitals worldwide signed on for a similar program, the Door-to-Balloon campaign, designed to save lives by reducing door-to-balloon times to 90 minutes or less (per ACC/AHA guidelines). In 2005, the College developed and released the first set of appropriate use criteria (AUC). That set defined appropriate use for SPECT MPI, and AUC for other types of imaging and cardiovascular procedures soon followed.
In 2008, the College launched the Quality First Campaign, a visionary campaign well-suited to the legacy of our founders. Quality First sets a new standard for health system reform and brings our physicians and cardiac care team members to the forefront of reform efforts. The campaign advocates for patient value, universal access and more to elevate the quality of health care in America.
Today, the College leads a wide variety of quality improvement initiatives, like the Hospital-to-Home initiative to reduce cardiovascular readmissions by 20 percent by the end of 2012. The PINNACLE Network™ is the first registry-based cardiovascular network designed to help practices meet the changing demands of today’s health care environment. It incorporates the NCDR® PINNACLE Network™, which benchmarks quality of ambulatory care. Our FOCUS initiative assists practices in applying our AUC.
The members of the American College of Cardiology — now numbering more than 37,000 worldwide — continue to believe, as did our founders six decades ago, that quality cardiovascular care is not only our greatest goal but our sacred duty.
We have much left to do to improve the quality of cardiovascular care. We will continue to define quality care through clinical documents and guidelines. We will continue to forge new ground in measuring quality with NCDR registries. We will continue to bring quality to the point of care with new appropriate use criteria, quality improvement programs and support for health information technology. We will place special emphasis on the cardiovascular patient as a partner in his or her care.
The American College of Cardiology will continue to fulfill the great vision of our founders. We will meet the future, in the words of Franz Groedel, “not merely by dreams, but by concerted action and unextinguishable enthusiasm.”