UNC Gets $15M Grant for 'Heart Health Now!' Initiative

A recent $15 million health care grant to UNC is just the first step toward promoting healthier, longer lives for heart patients throughout North Carolina.

“We can really help practices – especially those that don’t have a lot of infrastructure support – rapidly disseminate new information, and get their patients better outcomes,” said UNC Associate Professor of Medicine Sam Cykert of the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research at UNC-Chapel Hill.

The $15 million grant comes from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. The agency works within the U.S. Dept. of Health & Human Services to “produce evidence to make health care safer, higher quality, more accessible, equitable, and affordable,” according to its mission statement.

Cykert explained how the three-year “Heart Health Now!” initiative will reduce cardiovascular risk.

“The idea is to very intensely engage a practice for one year,” said Cykert, “and during that one year, we help them understand the information system that we’re building in partnership with Community Care of North Carolina.

“We both get the practice used to the information coming in about their patients – which, really, is updated on a daily basis – and then we use these practice coaches to help the practices find ways of constantly re-engaging these patients.”

The intense one-year phase is followed by two years of maintenance checks.

The focus will be on practices and patients in rural areas and inner cities. By working with 300 small-to-medium practices across the state, researchers hope to yield better results for patients through improved medication management, and promoting behavioral changes.

“Electronic health records, while they do some things to improve care, they’re not structured in a way to build really good tracking systems of patients and registry systems,” said Cykert. “And they’re not built in a way to be able to give you a real sophisticated data analysis of what your patient’s risk situation is.

“So, we intend to provide these practices with the tools that give them all those services.”

Cardiovascular disease is the biggest cause of death in North Carolina, by far.

With that in mind, Cykert said he’s excited that policymakers seem to be putting more stock in primary care.

He added that reaching out to 300 primary caregivers in North Carolina will yield far greater results.

“By touching these 300 practices, we have the chance of actually reaching nearly a million patients,” said Cykert.