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AHA outlines its agenda for 2009
Advocacy organization is pushing for FDA to monitor tobacco and is making strides with the Get With the Guidelines program.
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The American Heart Association has four main efforts in advocacy for healthcare reform this year – funding for research, getting prevention strategies implemented, supporting adequate and affordable health care coverage, and improving quality of cardiovascular care.
AHA President Timothy Gardner, MD, and AHA’s President-elect, Clyde Yancy, MD, noted that while more than 20% of National Institutes of Health funding has gone into cancer-related disease research, only 1% of funding has gone to stroke and 4% to CVDs in the last year.
“There is viable research left unfunded,” Yancy, medical director of Baylor Heart and Vascular Institute at Baylor University Medical Center, Dallas, said. “If our research pipeline dries up, then our progress [stops].”
Yancy and Gardner said implementing prevention strategies in health care reform should be a priority because of the increase in CV risk factors that is occurring, despite the decline of disease.
Other agenda items
AHA supports insurance market reforms that would prevent discrimination based on pre-existing conditions and believes that the best way to achieve this goal is through an individual mandate with appropriate premium subsidies for those who need them.
“Our basic advocacy position is that every American must have adequate [health care] coverage, and without that we are not going to achieve our goals of a healthier nation,” said Gardner, medical director of Christiana Care’s Center for Heart and Vascular Health in Wilmington, Dela., during a media briefing in Washington, D.C. last month.
The AHA’s Get With the Guidelines program has helped disseminate evidence-based guidelines to clinicians in real time through the use of health information technology. AHA’s CEO Nancy Brown said that it typically takes 17 years for trial outcomes to become implemented in clinical practice and that Get With the Guidelines has expedited the process and affected the lives of 1.4 million patients.
“At point of care, the provider has access to guidelines and can use that to help define the treatment that patients should receive,” Brown said. Thousands of physicians have taken advantage of the program, she added.
The organization is also in support of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act that would give the FDA the authority to regulate the manufacturing, marketing and advertising of tobacco, as well as the Fitness Integrated with Teaching Kids Act, which holds schools accountable for providing students with high quality physical education. – by Judith Rusk