Cardiovascular disease (CVD) causes 2,200 deaths in Americans every day with one death every 39 seconds. Yet effective implementation of research-based interventions that reduce CVD-related illness and death remains a substantial challenge. The objective of this study is to test the scalability of a pharmacist-led, remote CVD risk and prevention services model in large, organizationally and culturally diverse hospitals and health-systems, many with high proportions of minority and underserved patients, using a pragmatic cluster-randomized design. This service is called the Cardiovascular Risk Service (CVRS). There are limited data on the barriers and facilitators of implementation to enhance the CVRS in these types of diverse, complex health-systems. Therefore, scaling up our effective, innovative team-based intervention will require an assessment of barriers and facilitators to CVRS adoption, implementation, and maintenance. Our central hypothesis is that barriers and facilitators to CVRS implementation will vary across diverse primary care offices. We will use mixed methods including interviews, observations, and an innovative physician-pharmacist collaboration survey we developed to predict implementation of pharmacy-based services. The rationale for this proposed study is that overcoming barriers to implementation of a novel strategy to improve secondary prevention of CVD will lead to innovative strategies for broader adoption by health systems throughout the US.
The objective of this study is to evaluate the implementation of of a remote, pharmacist-led cardiovascular risk service (CVRS) in 12 large, organizationally and culturally diverse hospitals and health-systems, many with high proportions of minority and underserved patients.