Top Ten Things To Know
     The AHA and the Million Hearts Initiative


1. Effective community prevention interventions have been underutilized due to a lack of a coordinated national effort to make these population interventions available to reduce CVD.

2. Million Hearts is designed to address the availability of prevention mechanisms by building upon key provisions in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and other policy initiatives to bring a measurable increase in CVD prevention.

3. Clinical prevention efforts will focus on:
• reducing uncontrolled blood pressure and cholesterol
• increasing aspirin use to prevent and reduce the severity of heart attacks and strokes

4. Community interventions will aim to:
• eliminate smoking and exposure to secondhand smoke
• decrease sodium and trans-fat intake in the population.

5. Improvements in access to preventive care and community prevention interventions though programs established under the ACA will help realize the full potential of the health reform for patients with CVD.

6. Key initiative elements include:
• Focusing clinical attention
• Transforming care delivery
• Increasing public awareness
• Improving medication adherence
• Encouraging healthier environments and behaviors
• Collecting meaningful data for decision making and quality improvement

7. In addition to improving CVD prevention in the next five years, Million Hearts aims to use the prevention of CVD as a model for how health reform can work to make a dramatic, immediate and sustainable impact on the healthcare system to save lives and prevent chronic disease.

8. The AHA will work with HHS to be collectively accountable for achieving the goals of Million Hearts, including evaluating and publicly reporting progress towards reducing one million heart attacks and strokes over the next 5 years.

9. The HHS initiative has the potential to make a significant contribution to the AHA’s 2020 impact goal to prevent 20% of CVD and stroke deaths by 2020, by preventing 10% of deaths from myocardial infarction and stroke (which account for one-third of all CVD deaths) over five years.

10. Million Hearts represents an unprecedented opportunity to bring CVD prevention to the forefront of federal health care policy.