Collaboration to Address Challenges in Cardiovascular Care

Cardiovascular care providers are under immense pressures to do more with less and to provider better outcomes at a reduced cost. The COVID-19 pandemic added to those challenges by causing a delay in procedure volumes, creating a backlog of procedures that needed to be done, and also by forcing hospitals to take staff from the cardiovascular care units and redeploy them to other wards.

“A lot of these challenges are falling on the shoulders of the personnel and what you see is a lot of staff burnout both at the nursing level and also at the physician level,” Frans Venker, business leader for image-guided therapy at Royal Philips, told MD+DI in a recent interview.

A collaboration between Philips, the American College of Cardiology (ACC), and MedAxiom (an ACC company) aims to address these challenges by delivering timely and actionable information to align physicians, operations, and finance stakeholders. Philips plans to leverage its cardiovascular R&D and clinical expertise, ACC will provide knowledge that leverages the skill and expertise of more than 54,000 members, and MedAxiom will contribute premier organizational performance solutions.

“This is a fantastic collaboration that truly can help the overall healthcare system to become more efficient and also more cost effective,” Venker said.

Philips’ integrated cardiovascular solutions are designed to provide the clinical confidence needed to deliver the right care at the right time. This powerful ecosystem cuts across the full spectrum of cardiac services with the goal of optimizing length of stay while reducing readmissions, providing data integration for improved insights and procedural performance. Learnings from this work alongside those provided by the ACC and MedAxiom are expected to empower cardiovascular service providers with data, education, and services to enable providers to optimize efficiency and reduce total cost of care, while continuing to provide the quality care.

“The ACC is mission-driven to transform cardiovascular care and improve heart health, and we embrace innovative ways of supporting clinicians and the entire cardiovascular care team,” said Cathleen C. Gates, CEO at the ACC. “By combining Philips’ depth of knowledge in cardiac care delivery with ACC’s robust guideline and clinical document offerings, we’re ensuring clinicians have access to guideline-driven best practices in an impactful way.”