WEDNESDAY, Sept. 1 (HealthDay News) -- The American College of Cardiology Foundation, the American Association of Cardiovascular and Pulmonary Rehabilitation, and the American Heart Association have issued updated performance measures on cardiac rehabilitation and secondary prevention services for patients who have experienced a cardiac event. The new performance measures were published online Aug. 30 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
The aim of the updated measures is to increase the appropriate and timely referral of patients to outpatient cardiac rehabilitation programs following cardiac events. The guidelines are intended to help hospitals and practicing clinicians more effectively track referral rates, adopt tools to improve rehabilitation program use, and improve the quality of care.
The new performance measures focus on referral to cardiac rehabilitation from both inpatient and outpatient settings, and include administrative codes for use in identifying patients eligible for inclusion in the denominator of each updated measure.
"These documents are intended to provide practitioners and institutions that deliver care with tools to measure the quality of their care and identify opportunities for improvement. It is our hope that application of these performance measures will provide a mechanism through which the quality of medical care can be measured and improved," the authors write.
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