Hi everyone. I'm Barb Christensen, and I'm here to talk about what's new and what's different. Over the past few years, I've provided an update on changes that have occurred or been planned for NCDR and accreditation services. My goal is to let you know about changes that we, ACC, believe are important for you to understand and be aware of. So, let's get started. Let's start with optimization. What's that? Well, it's a noun, and it means the action of making the best or most effective use of a situation or resource. It sounds ambitious, and it is. And how are we going to apply this to NCDR? Well, NCDR is a valued resource. I want to tell you how we're going to optimize it. The ACC's NCDR is the largest, most comprehensive outcomes-based CV registry in the world. A critical part of the college's strategic goal to advance quality, equity, and value of cardiovascular care, the NCDR Optimization Plan is a portfolio of programs that aims to maintain NCDR as one of the world's preeminent clinical science and quality institutions by focusing on innovation, accelerating the development of functionalities, and addressing the data collection burden. The NCDR vision is a world where NCDR advances patient care, outcomes, and value through knowledge and innovation. To fulfill that vision, the NCDR optimization effort will center on defining the needs of specific stakeholders and making sure we're meeting those needs by being efficient, interactive, anticipatory, and integrated per value. Let's look at each of those four pieces. We want to create a more seamless pipeline for clients to submit clinical data quicker and more frequently for faster analysis. We want to be interactive. We want to have enhanced analytic insights into patients and population care delivery and improved health outcomes. Anticipatory, proactively informing you of problems worth solving and signals where to focus for you, our stakeholder. And integrated per value, mindful of the quality and cost value equation and delivering targeted insights through data sets and partnership. A comprehensive current state assessment was completed to uncover pain points and key priorities for NCDR, casting a wide net among users, members, and staff to help inform the optimization development effort. The ensuing strategy falls along four key pillars. They are reduce the burden and enhance the scope of data collection, increase NCDR value to stakeholders, promote quality improvement, and support population health management. Let's look a little bit at each one of these. To reduce the burden and enhance the scope of data collection, we're looking to optimize NCDR infrastructure and performance, reduce the abstraction effort, and integrate with clinical workflow, enhance efficiency, consistency, and flexibility of operations, and expand the view of the episode of care. Looking to increase our value to you, the stakeholder, is to modernize our reporting and your user experience with the dashboards, expand and enhance the payer and regional offerings, building those relationships with the states and payers that you work with, inform quality improvement measurement in value-based care, and looking to continue to support quality improvement and efficiency with campaigns, tools, and education, and to advocate for high-quality cardiovascular care across patient populations by transforming our research and publications process and disseminating those knowledge and tools. The NCDR optimization plan was approved by the ACC's Board of Trustees in May of this year, and work has already begun on this high-priority, multidimensional project. We are so pleased to let you know that again this year, we featured NCDR and accreditation participants in U.S. News and World Report Best Hospitals for 2022. Every year, U.S. News and World Report Best Hospitals helps patients and caregivers find the best medical centers for themselves and their families. The guidebook features more than 2,000 hospitals and health systems that participate in the NCDR and or who have been awarded accreditation by the college and have been recognized by the ACC for their commitment to optimizing patient care and outcomes. Using this national recognition, the ACC highlights hospitals and health systems that are leaders in implementing the highest standards of patient care and protocols to ensure positive health outcomes. Communities know that they can rely on those institutions recognized to deliver superior cardiovascular care for patients. Your ongoing participation has earned you the right to celebrate and showcase your outstanding commitment to quality in this special promotion. We've created a toolkit that includes graphics, sample text, and more, and I've added a link to the resources page at the end of this presentation where you can find your hospital and download the toolkit. The ACC would also like to take this opportunity to thank you for continuing to support the NCDR and ACC accreditation services. Together, we can make a difference in the quality of cardiovascular care delivered to patients. And one final thing, the print edition of U.S. News Best Hospital hit the newsstands on September 14th, so pick up a copy if you haven't already. And did you know that in addition to the U.S. News and World Report Promotion Toolkit, ACC has resources for your facility that will help your marketing team share the achievements to your community. Our team has provided a social media kit, sample messages for Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. The ACC's CardioSmart website, designed for the patient and community, is where you'll find your facility profile on the Find Your Heart homepages. We encourage you to check the profile to make sure your information is up to date. And remember, October 17th to the 23rd is National Healthcare Quality Week, a great time to tell your community about all the good work you do every day. If your marketing team would like more information, please contact us through the NCDR or Accreditation Services Support Center. Now I'm so excited to let you know that ACC now offers new certification programs for critical access hospitals and freestanding emergency departments. Did you know that there are over 1,300 critical access hospitals in rural communities across the U.S. and over 900 of them offer emergency services? And there are well over 500 freestanding EDs. These facilities play a vital role in the health of the populations they serve. Yet unlike larger acute care hospitals, they don't provide the same level of cardiac services, yet have the same commitment to ensure their patients receive high-quality, guideline-driven care. That's why Chest Pain Center certification and freestanding ED certification was specifically designed to be consistent with accreditation requirements, yet with a lighter touch. Fewer essential components to help these facilities establish innovative methods of care for the low-risk, non-ST-elevated ACS and STEMI patients, while reducing variation in care and sustaining consistent quality improvement. Certification for critical access hospital is offered to those facilities meeting the CMS definition and who have a formal transfer protocol in place to manage STEMI and other ACS patients requiring a higher level care. If you'd like more information about these programs, you can visit the website, which is listed at the close of the presentation. Another offering from accreditation services is the launch of our new outpatient services designation for heart failure accreditation. Heart failure is generally a disease where the make or break clinical care occurs outside of the hospital with the careful management and titration of medicines, diet, and exercise. This new designation recognizes that heart failure care is only as good as the ambulatory continuum and that hospitalizations, unfortunately, is often the result of failing to effectively manage that care. The good news, however, is that with this approach, ACC's accreditation is helping hospitals to use heart failure hospitalization, particularly when it's a new diagnosis, to establish that outpatient care, follow-up appointments, guideline-directed therapies, and increasingly remote monitoring to make sure that patient stays out of the hospital in the future. Especially now when hospital bed availability is stretched, it's essential for hospitals to partner with a practice or clinic that supports the treatment and management of heart failure patients. Heart failure accreditation with outpatient services designation is designed to deliver the important tools and resources to hospitals and health systems and to recognize the committed partnership you have with practices or clinics. So with the collaborative effort of both the acute care and outpatient care entities working together, you can break that vicious cycle of heart failure readmissions. Again, if you'd like more information, visit our website and reference at the end of the presentation. Now, what's new or different with ambulatory surgery centers is the increasing growth of CV services being delivered in that setting. ACC quality solutions such as the cath PCI registry and cardiac cath lab accreditation are not limited to hospitals, but rather are location agnostic. If an ambulatory surgery center is an outpatient facility, either exclusive to CV services or supporting multiple service lines, they can designate themselves in the site profile for the registry. This allows you to not only measure performance against national benchmarks, but against a peer group as well. And cardiac cath lab accreditation applies a holistic approach to the assessment, treatment and management of patients receiving cath lab services, regardless of location. These two quality programs are solutions to help you sustain the delivery of care, regardless of location. If your hospital or health system operates an ambulatory surgery center, you may want to consider adding them to your registry and accreditation portfolio. If you have specific questions about these programs and how they work in the ASC space, we're happy to talk to you more and please contact us through the support center. Some of you may have asked why the name change from ICD registry to EP device implant registry. Well, in April, we expanded the scope to capture novel pacemaker procedures in addition to ICD and CRTD procedures. And aligning with the ACC's electrophysiology accreditation program, fully supporting the program's data requirements. The expanded scope of the EP device implant registry will allow hospitals to track new and existing procedures, giving them the ability to optimize patient care and outcomes, and is well positioned to provide the best care possible. In addition, the EP device implant registry now allows participants to capture data on shared decision-making, a compliance requirement for the CMS national coverage determination for ICD, CRTD, primary patient care and outcomes. Since its inception in 2005, the ICD registry has been the national standard for understanding patient selection, care and outcomes in patients receiving ICD therapy. The new EP device implant registry will continue to empower the patient care team in their decision-making by providing nationally benchmarked data on patient care and outcomes for broader range of devices. COVID, we can't seem to get away from it. And as many of you know, the cath PCI and chest pain MI registries have made available an auxiliary data collection module to capture COVID-19-specific patients. We've seen a good uptake in the number of facilities opting to submit data, and now detailed reporting lines were added to the dashboards in June. We want to thank all of you, cath, PCI, and chest pain MI registries for your support. We've seen a good uptake in the number of facilities opting to submit data, and now detailed reporting lines were added to the dashboards in June. We want to thank all of you, cath, PCI, and chest pain MI registry participants who are submitting COVID-19 data and helping to inform how the coronavirus is impacting patient care, treatment strategies, and affecting patient outcomes. Participants are welcome to begin collecting COVID-19 data at any time. And if you're interested in adding this, please review the auxiliary data collection companion guide available on the document's homepage to learn more. Another registry offering was the PCI Cost of Care Study Report. The ACC, in collaboration with FairHealth, a nonprofit that maintains a private claims repository, have collaborated to provide cath PCI registry participants a Cost of Care Study Report. There were seven documents associated with the report, including your facility's PCI Cost of Care. If you haven't downloaded the report and artifacts, I encourage you to do so and to share with your administrative and financial teams. You can find the report artifacts on your private file delivery page of the cath PCI registry, along with other resources that you might find beneficial. There's a new look to the QII Learning Center. We've added icons to help you find the level of course you need to meet your learning objective from Category A, B, and C courses are designed to build your knowledge from beginner to advanced. Currently, over 30 courses are now available to you with or without continuing education credit. You may not need CE now, but if and when you do, remember to check out the Learning Center to obtain that credit at no additional cost to you. We know you love case scenarios, and we do too. That's why we've moved them to the Learning Center so that all your education and training resources can be found in one location. The Clinical Quality Advisor team creates new case scenarios monthly, so check in often to get the latest one. New to the Learning Center is the addition of courses specific to ACC's Accreditation Services Program. More will be coming next year, and we're working to provide Learning Center access to all our accreditation users. The QII Learning Center is a great resource, and I encourage you to check it often. Multi-Factor Authentication, or MFA, is a security enhancement that ensures that users are who they say they are by requiring they provide two or more pieces of evidence to prove their identity. Each piece of evidence must come from a different category. I'm sure most of you are familiar with MFA, as many banking and financial institutes require that you prove who you say you are. We're starting to see a trend in healthcare where MFA is being adopted, and in some cases being required, by many of our participating facilities and health systems. ACC's security assessors have recommended we implement an MFA process due to the housing of protected health information. MFA has three categories, something you know, like your username, password, or ID, something you have, a mobile phone or email address, and something you are, such as a fingerprint. NCDR plans to start with the basics, which is something you know, your username, password, ID, and add something you have, like your email address. The way it works is that you will provide your user ID and password, and an email will be sent to your email on file, which contains a code for you to input, which will then allow access to the private side of the website. We will begin a pilot with a few volunteer sites in the next few weeks. Our plan is to implement in 2022, and we will provide communication, education, and resources to ensure as seamless transition as possible. We take the security of your facility data very seriously, and are committed to ensuring we're doing all we can to minimize the risk of exposure. I understand this may add an extra step, but a necessary step to protect your data. A few last updates specific to NCDR. We consistently strive to respond to your inquiries to the support center as quickly as we can, and our recently added contact us feature allows you to submit inquiries directly into our customer relationship management system, and receive an email with a case number, which is referenced when contacting us. Our plan is to enhance the contact us feature, where you will be directed to a new customer portal that will give you more information, such as a historical listing of inquiries submitted to NCDR, self-management, including closing your own case, the ability to provide screenshots and documents, provide additional comments and or questions to existing ones. And the ability to see internal comments added by NCDR staff while your inquiry is being resolved. More information will be provided as we get closer to implementing what we call web-to-case functionality. And finally, your feedback is important to us. Every other year, the NCDR sends out a participant user experience survey to all user email addresses associated with participating facilities. The last survey was in 2019, and we're getting ready to send out the 2021 survey in mid-October. It's designed to only take about 10 minutes to complete, yet provides us with insight into how we're doing and what's important for you, our user community. Thanks in advance for your time in completing the survey. This concludes what's new, what's different for this year. Here are a few resources that you might find helpful. And thank you for watching.

National Cardiovascular Data Registry

NCDR

accreditation services

NCDR Optimization Plan

quality improvement

population health management