Cardiometabolic Initiatives

Now, speaking of things that I'm very excited about and a highlighted project from the LATTICE Consortium, I want to share my own personal experience and project that we're doing at Johns Hopkins, at Penn State and Inova and many other sites we’re interested down the road if you like.

What we wanted to do was take on the challenge of patient empowerment and engagement around LDL-C and also inspire our clinicians to learn more about the importance of guideline and recommended focused LDL-C management.

And we wanted to do that through technology because we think technology is a scalable solution that can also be delivered at many different levels of health literacy.

It's engaging, it's video focused, it's kind of our culture now to be tech forward.

And so we're excited to get started on this.

What we're doing with Corrie Lipids and if you're wondering how we came up with Corrie, Corrie means heart.

And really that's the center of what we're doing. When we came up with Corrie Lipids, we’re addressing those barriers of patients having difficulty with getting access to the right information, being unclear about what cholesterol is in LDL-C, not understanding what a heart attack is, cardiovascular disease or coronary artery disease and really finding a way where we can deliver a smartphone based engagement tool along with clinician focus education and bring those guidelines and those expert consensus statement recommendations directly to the patients and the clinician to get to goal.

What we've been looking at in terms of our outcomes is, like I mentioned, these are outcomes that we really want to focus in on.

What's the bottom line here?

Well, we've just been talking about the fact that LDL-C is the most modifiable risk factor for reducing risk of cardiovascular events.

So we wanted to focus on that and our focus was let's get the LDL-C down under 70 and ideally under 55 for secondary prevention.

But we're also including primary prevention goals as well of less than 100 for our patients.

So really let's get to those guideline and recommended goals for LDL-C because we know they're so important.

We're also looking at patient activation because, let's be honest, as clinicians at the end of the day, if we can't get our patients to buy into what we want to do with taking, helping to manage their care and inspire them, then we're not really making any forward progress.

We're doing it just to do it, but we're not really engaging the patient.

So patient activation for us was the downloading of the app, the engagement in the clinical education videos and using the Corrie application

And the kind of patients that we're engaging as I mentioned either have known ASCVD.

So these are patients who, but you might be thinking gosh, a smartphone application like perhaps you're targeting, you know, a certain younger cohort.

No, we're looking for patients who have had bypass, who have had coronary disease, stroke, have PAD are high risk, we take care of a lot of familial hypercholesterolemia patients, a lot of patients with ASCVD risk that's elevated and subclinical ASCVD and coronary calcium score and those that have statin intolerance, right. That's one of the themes that we start to educate about in our Corrie Lipids Program.

So I think when we put this together, I'll share some learnings since I think that's really important when you think about getting inspired about doing a project. You know, a lot of people were thinking to yourself, gosh, it's a busy clinical workflow.

How are you going to bring an app into the workflow for a patient?

And do you have to train them and how's this all going to work out and how are they going to engage in that?

But what we found is that there is a interest from the patients to learn more that we often can't cover in a very short clinical exchange in our clinics, right?

We have maybe 15-30 minutes if you're lucky with the patient.

And so we learned that, yes, there are some always technical challenges that come with letting someone know that they're going to be downloading an app and they're going to start to use it.

But we're trying to tackle a problem that hasn't been tackled before.

And we're working with our nurses, with our leadership who were very quick to say we're interested. We're interested in trying to do something that's patient centered that could ultimately deliver better guideline based care.

And you're doing this in a programmatic fashion that's systematic, that's using the re-aim framework, which helps us to explore an implementation model about, is this going to work, at our clinics, but is this also going to work at our other sites?

And can we get up to 1000 patients rapidly to use this tool? And then ultimately, is it going to make a difference?

And so I, I just want to share those kinds of learnings and conversations and points because, I sure don't want to get up here and make you think, gosh, okay, they did it there, but it might be challenging to do it at, our center.

There might be challenges, but all of those challenges can be overcome with starting to work with the right stakeholders, having good collaborative conversations and just never giving up when it comes to getting LDL-C under better control.

So that's some of our experiences with Corrie Lipids. I'll mention one more thing.

We are already getting early data and I can't share that in this presentation, but I'm hoping that next year we can start to give you a glimpse at how this is making a difference with our patients engaging our LDL-C numbers.

And it's just hopefully an inspiration to all to think, gosh, you know, it's one thing to create ABPA, it's one thing to do an educational, but going in and really doing an intervention that's like a smartphone app that, you know, those are next level kind of things.

I encourage you all to be next level to think about how this can be really great for your institution, whether you choose technology or whether you choose a paper based program or whether you choose to do something totally separate from the EHR.

But go ahead and take the challenge because at the end of the day, we're already seeing great results on our side.

And it took a lot to get it started.

But now that we're moving, it's so exciting to see the difference and to also see our patients really resonate.