Leveraging Health Information Technology and Team Change to Improve Cardiovascular Disease Prevention in Rheumatoid Arthritis

The overall goals of this project are to implement and test a practical multi-faceted systembased intervention that will: (1) increase CVD risk factor assessment (blood pressure, total and HDL cholesterol, diabetes mellitus [DM] status, and smoking status) among RA patients; (2) systematically identify unaddressed increased CVD risk or uncontrolled risk factors in a manner that is both consistent with current U.S. guidelines and also accounts for the increased CVD risk in RA; (3) increase rheumatologist counseling about CVD risk; and (4) increase appropriate pharmacotherapy for CVD risk reduction (specifically moderate-to-high intensity statins and antihypertensive drug treatment) by promoting co-management and improving physician-tophysician communication. We will accomplish these goals using provider education, provider facing computerized clinical decision support, electronic health record (EHR)-supported quality measurement and provider feedback, and rheumatology care-team redesign using a care manager.