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As health care has evolved and improved over the past decade, health inequities in rural areas have persisted — and even grown. People in rural communities live an average of three years fewer and have 30% higher risk of stroke compared with their counterparts in small metropolitan and urban areas. Improving the health of rural populations is consistent with the AHA’s commitment to health equity and its focus on social determinants of health (SDOH) to reduce and ideally to eliminate health disparities.
A three-year initiative by the American Heart Association®, will work to ensure Americans living in rural areas have the best possible chance of survival and the highest quality of life attainable by promoting consistent, timely, and appropriate evidence-based care.
The Rural Health Care Outcomes Accelerator, launched in 2022, will achieve that aim by providing up to 700 program participants with no-cost access to add new Get With The Guidelines® quality programs for coronary artery disease, heart failure and stroke.
Attendees of The International Stroke Conference 2023 can visit the Get With The Guidelines booth in HeadQuarters to speak with a quality improvement program consultant about enrollment in the accelerator.
These programs allow hospitals to measure compliance to cares supported by evidence-based guidelines, benchmark their performance against peers, and improve on consistency of patient care, while contributing to rural cohort data inform future healthcare guidelines.
“The American Heart Association is committed to bringing equitable care to all, regardless of where they live,” said Karen E. Joynt Maddox, MD, MPH, volunteer expert for the American Heart Association, co-author on “Call to Action: Rural Health: A Presidential Advisory From the American Heart Association and American Stroke Association” and co-director of the Center for Health Economics and Policy at the Institute for Public Health at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. “Especially for health systems and referring rural hospitals within the stroke system of care, this initiative presents a crucial opportunity to improve stroke care across entire networks.”
Over three years, the Association will convene rural clinical experts and leaders to develop and publish rural quality and outcomes research. Participating hospitals will also will have access to professional education, an online rural community network that encourages peer-to-peer connection and provides resources to support model practice sharing, and collaborative innovation.
To maximize impact, rural eligible hospitals will be prioritized based on their potential to impact the largest number of patients in geographic areas with the highest cardiovascular disease mortality. Participating hospitals must be either a federally designated critical access hospital or a short-term acute care facility or rural hospital in Rural Urban Commuting Area Codes indicating rural and isolated geographic locations.
“This innovative approach is part of the solution to improving rural health across the country,” Joynt Maddox said. “The American Heart Association is in a unique position to help close the gap between rural and urban hospital care.”
Addressing the particular health needs of people in rural America is critical to achieving the American Heart Association’s 2024 impact goal for equitably increasing healthy life expectancy nationwide. Innovative approaches like this are key to improving rural health across the nation.
Interested hospitals are invited to learn more online and visit the Get With the Guidelines expo booth within HeadQuarters (booth #708) at the International Stroke Conference 2023 in Dallas, Texas on February 8th and 9th.