Enhanced Cardiovascular Disease Surveillance in the CVRN

In the arena of health care challenges, this one is rather ambitious and relevant. With the help of a $7.2 million grant from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, research scientists representing all 15 organizations in the Cardiovascular Research Network (CVRN) will develop in two years a surveillance system which will provide insights into the burden of cardiovascular disease and how to reduce the rate of heart disease and stroke, two of the top three causes of death in the United States.

The new surveillance system for cardiovascular disease will use the electronic medical records of more than 11 million people to examine such things as therapeutic interventions, post-event outcomes and important risk factors for cardiovascular diseases.

“We will be looking at the rates of cardiovascular conditions like heart attacks, stroke and heart failure in each of these CVRN sites,” said Steve Sidney, MD, Associate Director of Clinical Research at the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research and Principal Investigator on the project. “This is important because there’s really no way to tell how well our preventive efforts are doing if we don’t know what the true rates of disease are and how they’re changing over time.”

The surveillance system will include electronically available data on risk factors, coexisting illnesses, laboratory testing, other patient characteristics, prescription medications, therapeutic interventions, and physician characteristics. It will allow researchers to assess the relationships of these variables to the course of disease as well as address research questions relating to comparative effectiveness and to disparities in medical treatment and outcomes.

Rather than starting the system from scratch, the project will use the data resources of 15 member organizations in the Cardiovascular Research Network. The CVRN, funded initially for five years by the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute beginning in September 2007, is a national collaborative and resource that was designed to apply scientific and content expertise, diverse populations, and data sources from its member organizations to address major cardiovascular research questions.

“This study is a prime example of the types of studies that the CVRN can accomplish. The combined CVRN expertise and infrastructure make it easier, cost-effective and more efficient to conduct large scale, multi-center cardiovascular observational studies and clinical trials,” says Dr. Alan Go, Director of the CVRN and Director of the Comprehensive Clinical Research Unit at the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research, “In addition, this study will pave the way for other large scale studies that combine electronic health records across the US.”