Million Hearts ®

Million Hearts® is a national initiative to prevent 1 million heart attacks and strokes by 2017. Million Hearts® has the potential to help improve the health of millions of Americans by improving the ABCS:

  • Aspirin Therapy When Appropriate
  • Blood Pressure Control
  • Cholesterol Management
  • Smoking Cessation

Regional Extension Centers (RECs) help providers and practices improve health outcomes (for example, hypertensive patients) by leveraging health information technology (HIT) to take targeted but impactful action on the ABCS through Million Hearts®.

Million Hearts® EHR Optimization Guides

Million Hearts® EHR Optimization Guides help healthcare professionals leverage their EHR systems to excel in the ABCS. Through helpful step by step instructions, the Guides illustrate how providers can use their EHR products to find, use, and improve data on the Million Hearts® clinical quality measures. Ultimately, these guides facilitate the identification of at-risk patients, helping clinical teams across the country protect their patients from heart attacks, strokes, and other cardiovascular events.

ONC encourages all EHR vendors to collaborate with us on developing additional Million Hearts® EHR Optimization Guides. For more information about developing your own Guide for HealthIT.gov, please contact us. Let’s work together towards improving the heart health of millions of Americans!

Find out how RECs are supporting the Million Hearts® Initiative

Call to Action

RECs and their partners are invited to participate in ONC’s Million Hearts® Call to Action. This is a great opportunity for RECs to support providers and practices in clinical quality improvement. Quality improvement may sound complex, but it can be as simple as finding ways to do our work better, faster, and easier – and health IT tools can be great resources. Our goal is to help 5,000 providers leverage Health IT to track and measure success on two Million Hearts® measures: Blood Pressure Control and Smoking Cessation.

Here’s how you can get started in the Million Hearts® Call to Action:

  1. Read up on the people, tools and resources available:
  2. Plan your intervention: a good framework is the plan-do-study-act PDSA model. A simple but powerful example could be:
    1. Run a blood pressure and/or smoking status registry report for all patients in the practice to see where improvements can be made. This report is a baseline.
    2. Implement an intervention that is appropriate for your practice (e.g. commit to 100% blood pressure screening and re-screening as needed for every patient, every visit).
    3. Run another registry report at a later date and determine whether the measure has been improved. Now you can see the impact of your intervention.
  3. Tell your story: assess and evaluate your practice’s experience, and share your success stories with ONC.