Welcome to Lesson 4 of ACC's Heart Failure Accreditation Overview Course. This learning activity was developed by myself, I am Liza St. Clair, and I will also be narrating this presentation. The purpose of this lesson is to provide an understanding of the value and benefits of accreditation, especially as your site begins the accreditation journey. Our objectives for this lesson is to define the goals of the ACC and Heart Failure Accreditation, describe how achieving ACC Heart Failure Accreditation will improve the delivery of care, patient outcomes while reducing costs, and lastly, identify the collection of ACC resources that complement and support your facility in achieving Heart Failure Accreditation status. The ACC's mission is to transform cardiovascular care and improve heart health, with a vision for a world where innovation and knowledge optimize cardiovascular care and outcomes. Therefore, the ACC is also heavily vested in a collaborative partnership to ensure your facility achieves Heart Failure Accreditation. Heart Failure Accreditation was created with the mission to reduce mortality within the heart failure population as evidenced by observations of the tremendous disparity of care, lack of specialized management, and continued needs to provide a foundation to establish change. The goal of every item within the accreditation platform is to create and develop each necessary piece of the puzzle, arming each facility with the tools to build and transform heart failure programs to reach the highest caliber of patient-centered care delivery, incorporating the science, best practice, and proven strategy to reduce mortality and improve patient care delivery. Currently, within the healthcare industry, we are shifting from volume to value. The industry is challenged with inadequate patient care, outcomes, and potential financial penalties. Reduction in staff and resources has led to a decrease in staff morale and, thus, staff turnover. We are all trying to do more with less, and our objective is to provide each facility with a roadmap to success. Through the accreditation process, the facility will gain access to critical and timely data, determine gaps, improve processes which promote and create efficiency. We foster the utilization of a multidisciplinary staff and team, which empowers them and improves resource utilization, improves patient outcomes, and in the interim, improves financial outcome. We do not start caring for the patients when they first step foot into the hospital or when they are rolled onto the inpatient unit, but rather, care begins with our interactions with the framework and infrastructure created to support the community and the population we serve. The heart failure accreditation tool then streamlines care by identifying the type of patient to define an appropriate treatment pathway, which is supported by the guidelines, evidence-based literature, and best practices. By recognizing that suitable utilization of facility resources can assist to reduce or avoid adverse events and undesirable outcomes, realizing that it takes time to adopt quality and process improvement initiatives, an allowance of one year is given for a site to achieve all mandatory requirements for accreditation. With an assigned accreditation review specialist for your facility, the journey towards accreditation is attainable. The ACC's ARS has the expertise to provide tailored guidance, recommendations, and note any opportunities to achieve your accreditation status. Whether building, strengthening, or specializing a program, heart failure accreditation can provide the structure and the roadmap for improving a facility's current process. The first step in the accreditation process is to understand and assess the current facility processes. An organization may be starting their program from scratch or may currently have a heart failure program in place. It is important to first understand and generate a baseline report to properly evaluate and conduct a gap analysis. The baseline report will provide valuable information regarding heart failure program operations as well as providing data on the organization's performance measures. It is important to provide an accurate assessment of the organization's current process. When conducting the baseline gap analysis, it will behoove the organization to be honest and truthful with the current realities and operation of their existing heart failure program. By doing so, this will allow our staff to identify any shortfalls and partner to build upon current processes and focus on specific quality and process improvement initiatives that would strengthen the program and result in the most beneficial outcomes for the patients and community. Performance improvement initiatives can include the implementation of specialized education, creating an observation services program or process, utilizing better data process to increase transparency or expand follow-up and care transition services. And lastly, by employing process improvement initiatives, this will result in improved data submission and data utilization. By achieving heart failure accreditation, it will elevate the care provided to the heart failure population. Specialty education for the facility heart failure champions is required. Continuing medical education for physicians and continuing education for the staff can be easily attained through various ACC educational offerings. Many of the ACC educational courses are free and can be completed online for convenience. Improved reimbursement can also be achieved through seeking the outpatient designation. By expanding or providing a heart failure outpatient services program, a facility has the potential of significantly avoiding costly readmissions and reducing the risk of imposed reimbursement penalties. Specific criteria for instituting an outpatient clinic or adopting telehealth services post-discharge will allow providers and clinicians to ensure compliance with the heart failure teachings provided and adherence with guideline-directed medical therapy post-discharge. All facilities have access to the designation criteria. Even if the facility has not thought about applying for the outpatient services designation, we strongly encourage a review of these line items for consideration. This may be an opportunity to incorporate as a strategic option in the future. It's important to understand that all mandatory essential component line items within the Heart Failure Accreditation Tool are based on science and the guidelines. All references for these line items can be found within the tool. In addition, a workgroup of heart failure experts reviewed and evaluated each criterion and provided their insightful knowledge on observed best practices, clinical expertise, and experience, focused on standardization, decreasing variance in care, and order set utilization to ultimately improve patient outcomes. All mandatory essential component line items within the Accreditation Tool include the Class 1 recommendations within the guidelines. This table illustrates the breakdown of Class 1, 2, A and B, and Class 3. This classification system is a result of combining the size and the effect to the level which grades the certainty or impact on which the recommendation is based. The ACC Heart Failure Accreditation Online Tool is comprehensive and convenient. It allows for patient data collection and outcomes reports, access to references, and provides examples of heart failure program policies and protocols. With ACC's Heart Failure Accreditation Tool, the facility has access to educational sessions online and a complimentary registration for ACC's Quality Summit. In addition, educational webinars can be found on our website. As the professional home for cardiovascular care, the ACC has an abundance of resources. It is not only geared towards healthcare professionals, but also patients. The Heart Failure Version 4 Accreditation Tool is one of those invaluable products that brings to fruition the guidelines, evidence-based literature, best practices, and education at the patient bedside. Lastly, looking at the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015, or MACRA, and some of the financial incentives that can be applied, achieving heart failure accreditation can fulfill the process improvement needs for achieving MACRA incentives at an optimal status. Heart failure accreditation can offer standardized protocols, orders, and pathways that are heart failure-specific for each level of care provided in the acute hospital setting. There is a community outreach component which promotes screenings and patient and provider education. To address transitions of care, accreditation fosters patient education techniques with validation and teaching modalities, such as Teach Me 3 or Teach Backpatient. Family and caregiver involvement in this education is important as well, and will provide guidance on heart failure-specific protocols, policies, and pathways for care transition. All of these pieces can be utilized as process improvement initiatives to help clinicians meet their MACRA status. As mentioned earlier, by streamlining care, we can effectively establish and manage observation services. This is important to the low-risk population and for cost savings. Our tool assists to track length of stay of the observation patients, to assist in determining how the facility is performing against the standards and cost benchmarks. There are cost savings associated with providing observation care. This is a snapshot provided by the advisory board, showing a breakdown of how improved care processes and decrease in variance and observation truly can be a money saver. As shown, the biggest savings is in the chest pain population. However, Heart Failure Observations Services has demonstrated a $45,000 savings. Through heart failure accreditation, your facility has the opportunity to improve the quality of life for the heart failure population, resulting in decreased mortality, length of stay, and readmissions while increasing patient satisfaction, decreasing cost, and increasing revenue. The heart failure accreditation process is an external review in partnership with each facility to foster implementation of latest evidence-based guidelines, data utilization to support clinical decisions, incorporation of process improvement modalities to promote better patient outcomes, ensure successful transitions of care delivery, with an overall goal of decreasing clinical variation by increasing quality and decreasing costs. In conclusion, we must do better for our heart failure patients and for all health care organizations to care for them. There are many different barriers and struggles, not only within the disease and the progression of heart failure, but also within our health care delivery system. By partnering with the American College of Cardiology and employing accreditation requirements, establishing proper interventions, implementing quality and process improvement initiatives, the facility will be able to transform their improvements into better patient outcomes across the continuum of care for this patient population. This concludes Lesson 404. You have now completed all lessons. Thank you for your participation.

Heart Failure Accreditation

Improving Care Delivery

Multidisciplinary Collaboration

Guideline-based Treatment Pathways

Financial Incentives

Quality care

Patient outcomes

Cost reduction

Evidence-based guidelines