Silver Spring, Md. (July 27, 2017) – Committed to providing access to quality care for people living with pulmonary hypertension (PH), the Pulmonary Hypertension Association (PHA) continues to roll out its Pulmonary Hypertension Care Centers (PHCC) accreditation program.
The Pulmonary Hypertension Programs at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Mich. have recently received the PHCC Center of Comprehensive Care (CCC) accreditation. Since PHA’s accreditation program launched in 2014, 54 programs in 28 states have received PHCC accreditation. The total includes 43 adult and eight pediatric CCCs along with three adult Regional Clinical Programs (RCPs).
PH is a progressive, life-threatening, debilitating disease resulting in high blood pressure of the lungs due to narrowing of the pulmonary arteries. It forces the right side of the heart to pump so hard to move blood into the lungs that it can lead to heart failure. Symptoms are non-specific and include shortness of breath, fatigue and chest pain. Because patients go months, sometimes years, believing they have something other than PH, most patients are ultimately diagnosed with an advanced form of the disease. But early and accurate diagnosis, quality care and appropriate treatments available for two forms of PH — pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) and chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension (CTEPH) — can extend and improve the quality of life for many patients.
PHA PHCC program administrators say that as the PHCC quality improvement initiative receives a steady flow of applications from interested programs throughout the country its focus remains true to the goal of raising the overall quality of care and outcomes in PH patients. To this end, PHA encourages all accredited sites to participate in the program’s PHA Registry (PHAR). The PHAR is a multi-center, prospective, observational registry of newly evaluated patients diagnosed at accredited centers in the U.S. with PAH or CTEPH. PHAR-participating centers collect baseline information when a patient is initially evaluated and follow-up data at approximately six-month intervals. The primary goal of the PHAR is to measure and improve quality of care — including assessing differences in centers’ adherence to evidence-based guidelines and establishing benchmarks for health outcomes — and to begin to learn relationships between adherence to expert-recommended care strategies and patient outcomes.
The PHAR gives accredited centers a platform to perform their own research and quality improvement initiatives and assess patient-reported outcomes, including health-related quality of life. Each PHAR site can access its own data in real-time, enabling the center to analyze and understand important information about their own patient populations and care practices. As of July 2017, 26 accredited programs are participating in the PHAR and have already enrolled over 300 patients.
About the Pulmonary Hypertension Association
Headquartered in Silver Spring, Md., the Pulmonary Hypertension Association (PHA) is the country’s leading pulmonary hypertension organization. PHA’s mission is to extend and improve the lives of those affected by PH; its vision is a world without PH, empowered by hope. PHA achieves this by connecting and working together with the entire PH community of patients, families, health care professionals and researchers. For more information and to learn how you can support PH patients, visit www.PHAssociation.org and connect with PHA on Twitter and Instagram @PHAssociation and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/PulmonaryHypertensionAssociation.
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