Combat Heart Disease and Health Inequities: COZEVA Can Help You Better Monitor Your Patients’ Heart Health

This February marks the 57th American Heart Month, which aims for greater awareness of cardiovascular health issues. CDC Toolkits are available for health care and public health professionals, including health education resources for patients.

Heart Disease and Health Equity Issues

Heart disease remains the leading cause of death in the U.S. (CDC). During the COVID-19 pandemic, Black, Hispanic, and Asian populations experienced a disproportionate rise in deaths from heart and cerebrovascular diseases (Wadhera, 2021).

Stratifying measures will help investigate and address inequities in care with better data.The National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) has selected the following five measures, beginning in MY2022 which will stratify reporting results by race and ethnicity:

Controlling High Blood Pressure
Colorectal Cancer Screening
Hemoglobin A1c Control for Patients with Diabetes
Prenatal and Postpartum Care
Child and Adolescent Well Care Visits

Use COZEVA to Manage Your Patients’ Heart Health and More!

As a population health management tool, COZEVA allows plan administrators, provider organizations, and their practices to easily track their patients’ care opportunities.

We are working on ingesting and displaying race, ethnicity, and language data into our platform for our clients to use for risk stratification for outreach efforts. Whether it’s to encourage patients to come in for their annual wellness visit to review current or potential chronic conditions, to reviewing medications for older adults, monitoring medications after a heart attack or after a diagnosis of cardiovascular disease, and tracking blood pressure control following a diagnosis of hypertension or diabetes.

As a real-time metrics engine, COZEVA’s gap reports and powerful Analytics can better inform outreach efforts. With options to target patients by geographic area, by length of time from last screenings, medication adherence, or by available race, ethnicity or language data, these efforts can improve patient compliance and engagement for improved health outcomes during these times of limited resources and uncertainty.

References:

Wadhera, Rishi K et al. Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Heart and Cerebrovascular Disease Deaths During the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States. June 2021.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34000814/

The Future of HEDIS: Health Equity (June 2021)

Data, Measurement and Equity (NCQA)

FastStats (CDC)

Proposed Changes to Existing Measures for HEDIS®1 MY 2022: Introduction of Race and Ethnicity Stratification Into Select HEDIS Measures (NCQA)