Hadley Wilson, MD: HF Guidelines and the ACC's International Growth

Hadley Wilson, MD, the chair of the American College of Cardiology's Board of Governors and secretary of the Board of Trustees, spoke with MD Magazine at ACC.18 about the new heart failure guidelines and how the ACC is attempting to make them more technologically available.

The clinical professor of medicine at UNC also spoke about the ACC's efforts to connect with cardiologists on a more worldwide scale to help improve cardiac outcomes globally.

Hadley Wilson, MD:

Yes, so the new guidelines for heart failure, I think, represent another win for the ACC—American College of Cardiology—and cardiovascular health care professionals around the world. That is simply because these are downloadable, they're in an easy knowledge-chunk format of bytes that can be easily disseminated on your smartphone to the point of care. Professionals in the office, health care providers in the hospital, or in any setting, can make this information readily available.

What we know is that, actually, since they've been released this year, this is the most downloadable piece of information from the ACC in the science arena to date. There were well over 25,000 downloads of this information, of these guidelines—which is a really high amount for health care professionals.

I think that everyone is trying to change with the times and trying to get this information, again, to the point of care, where it can be used most effectively and take care of our patients. So that's really wonderful.

Another point I want to talk about is the ACC is also involved, not only in STEMI care in the United States but now are trying to scale internationally to other countries throughout the world. Particularly, not so much Western Europe, which has great heart attack care as well right now, but to the LAMI (the low and middle-income countries) throughout the world to try and develop systems of heart attack care. Because, again, this is one of the groups that are at highest risk for heart attacks and STEMI.

So, we are working with our international partners. The ACC now has over 40 chapters in other countries throughout the world. It is one of the highest distinctions for cardiologists in other parts of the world to be associated or have the ACC distinction, and in working with them we are trying to partner to help develop regional systems of care to help treat patients immediately at the site where they are, and then also transport those patients for definitive care and set up these systems of regular pathways for their treatment so that we can reduce heart attack mortality worldwide.