August 18 - Kaiser Database to Help Stanford Researchers Study Heart Disease

The American Heart Association has awarded Kaiser Permanente’s (KP) Division of Research (DOR) in Oakland, Calif., and Stanford University Medical Center $3.89 million over the next four years to establish jointly a new heart research center that aims to define optimal clinical care for patients with coronary heart disease and chronic heart failure.

The KP DOR and Stanford Medical Center will conduct large-scale observational effectiveness and safety studies of therapies for these diseases by leveraging KP’s large, detailed, and longitudinal clinical databases and by using the research expertise of both KP’s Division of Research and Stanford scientists.

The American Heart Association — Pharmaceutical Roundtable (AHA-PRT) Outcomes Research Center is coled by Mark Hlatky, MD, a professor of health research and policy and a professor of medicine at Stanford, and Alan Go, MD, a senior research scientist at DOR and the regional medical director of clinical trials. Several other KP DOR investigators are coinvestigators and research mentors.

The first two studies by the new center will use state-of-the-art analytic research methods to evaluate the effectiveness of various pharmacologic therapies and emerging technologies in patients with a variety of heart conditions. These treatments include prescription drugs, implanted devices such as stents and defibrillators, and procedures such as coronary bypass surgery.

The AHA-PRT will involve Ralph Brindis, MD, MPH, cardiologist and senior advisor on cardiovascular diseases for The Permanente Medical Group and vice president of the American College of Cardiology, who will provide an experienced clinical, organizational, and national perspective as questions are formulated and addressed.

The Stanford-Kaiser Permanente Cardiovascular Outcomes Research Center is one of three new centers to receive funds from the AHA to improve the nation’s cardiovascular health by investigating the best possible treatments for heart disease. The other centers are at Duke University and UCLA.

“The core of the AHA-PRT center is our plan to link together the various electronic databases used for patient care at Kaiser Permanente,” says Hlatky. This will be the first effort making use of all the medical databases for KP’s 3.3 million members throughout northern California to investigate the use and outcomes of the various treatment options for heart disease patients. “Our goal is to identify a representative population of patients who have coronary disease or heart failure and document which treatments they are getting and how well those treatments are working,” he says.

This AHA award follows another huge collaborative research effort led by the KP DOR to understand cardiovascular disease: the Cardiovascular Research Network.

Established last year through a $7.5 million grant by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, the Cardiovascular Research Network is leveraging the collective cardiovascular expertise, diverse community-based study populations and rich electronic data systems within 15 HMOs in the HMO Research Network to better study the epidemiology, prevention, management, and outcomes of cardiovascular diseases

Cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death among Americans. Yet for the 3.3 million KP members in northern California, the chance of dying of a heart attack or stroke is 30% lower than average because of KP’s evidence-based cardiovascular Healthy Heart program.

Source: Kaiser Permanente