Heart disease is the leading cause of death for both men and women and about 610,000 people die of it in the U.S. every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The American College of Cardiology (ACC) will add a tool that predicts cardiovascular disease to the Apervita Marketplace, which is a platform for executing and sharing health analytics and data.

The ACC’s ESCVD Risk Estimator, which was launched jointly with the American Heart Association, is a tool used to facilitate discussions among physicians and patients about reducing the risk of heart disease through lifestyle changes.

To date, it has been downloaded more than 250,000 times and is used over 7,000 times per day by individual providers. But in its current form, the data has to be manually transferred between electronic health records (EHRs).
ACC’s goal is to make it so the tool is available to every physician who treats cardiovascular disease. By incorporating it into the Apervita Marketplace, physicians will be able to access it through their EHRs and other systems that they use on a daily basis.

"Connecting the ACC's ASCVD Risk Estimator with electronic medical records on this platform will make this decision-support tool more broadly available to busy physicians and other members of the care team around the world,” Dino Damalas, chief information officer of the ACC, said in a statement.

The Risk Estimator is meant to be a companion tool to the 2013 ACC/AHA Guideline on the Assessment of Cardiovascular Risk and the 2013 ACC/AHA Guideline on the Treatment of Blood Cholesterol to Reduce Atherosclerotic Cardiovascular Risk in Adults.

It allows physicians to estimate 10-year and lifetime risks for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, which includes coronary death or nonfatal myocardial infarction or fatal or nonfatal stroke. The information that is needed is the patient’s age, sex, race, total cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, systolic blood pressure, blood pressure lowering medication use, diabetes status and smoking status.

"Clinicians are beginning to be weighed down by today's growing amount of digital health data, and their time is becoming absorbed in tasks that computers and prediction tools could easily assist them with, providing them the insight they need when they need it,” Paul Magelli, CEO of Apervita, said in a statement.

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