The Gross Center for Cardiovascular Care Innovation and Transformation

Recent Highlights

Embracing novel access strategies: We are adopting a variety of technologies that make it easier for providers to share information, collaborate and ensure that each patient receives timely, effective care. These technology strategies include:

• E-consultation: We adopted an EMR-integrated process that facilitates asynchronous communication between providers. This allows providers to collaborate on patient care for low acuity needs without tying up clinic resources associated with a visit.
• Virtual cardiologist: We implemented technology and created a workflow that enables providers in different locations to communicate in real time, enhancing care in the inpatient and outpatient settings.
• Sanger mobile app: We developed a user-friendly app that contains key cardiovascular pathways and enables providers to quickly collaborate from wherever they’re located.

Scaling up advanced analytics: With generous support from the William, Jeff and Jennifer Gross Family Foundation, Sanger created an advanced analytics team that merges traditional clinical data with other information including clinical registries, neighborhood demographics, cost analytics and patient-recorded outcome measures.

In 2023, we expanded this work to include data from more than 10 partner facilities across this Southeast. We also added equity markers that will enable us to identify and better understand care disparities.

By giving us a deeper understanding of the care we provide and how it affects the populations we serve, our analytics work will help us reduce disparities and ensure that each patient receives innovative care that delivers the best opportunity for the best possible outcomes, at the highest value.

Expanding the Perfect Care Initiative: We launched our Perfect Care Initiative in 2019 to improve patient access and education, while eliminating disparities in peri-procedural cardiac surgery care. This initiative ensures each patient receives the same level of care, across the continuum, at each of our locations. And it uses a personalized, patientcentered approach to engage cardiac surgery patients and their families at each step in their care journey, including education, preoperative optimization and postsurgical care.

We continued expanding this initiative in 2023, when more than 1,500 patients participated in remote patient monitoring following cardiovascular surgery. This helped fuel significant improvements in outcomes: Our latest research shows a 37% reduction in

30-day mortality and readmission in the Perfect Care Initiative cohort versus a propensity-matched control group.

Improving hypertension through remote management: To date, more than 700 patients have graduated from our remote patient monitoring hypertension “bootcamp.” This virtual clinic is staffed by pharmacists, advanced practice providers, nurses and health advocates, supported by Bluetooth-enabled blood pressure cuffs. The goal is to establish control of blood pressure through lifestyle modification and medication adjustment over 6 to 8 weeks. The patients who have graduated to date have seen an average drop in blood pressure of 18/9.

Sanger Heart & Vascular Institute team was a principle in developing and submitting a $9 million, 5-year PCORI grant awarded in 2023 for Remote Hypertension Tracking Help and Management to Reduce Disparities in Black Patients (RHYTHM – B).