"The lesson in that for me is you can have the greatest tool, but if people don't use it, it won't do anything," says Eckman. "The good news is in the subgroup of physicians that made the effort to use the tool it did have a significant impact on improving treatment."

Still more research is needed when it comes to outcomes for atrial fibrillation.


"We did not follow up on outcomes as to whether strokes were higher or lower in the intervention group as such an analysis would have required a significantly larger number of patients and a number of years of review to have the data needed," says Eckman, noting a study on outcomes could be the focus of future research.

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Other faculty and staff in the College of Medicine at the University of Cincinnati contributing to this research are: Alexandru Costea, MD, Jack Kues, PhD, Matthew Flaherty, MD, Ruth Wise, MSN, MDes, Brett Kissela, MD, Dawn Kleindorfer, MD, Anthony Leonard, PhD, Dylan Steen, MD, Peter Baker, Robert Ireton, Dave Hoskins, Brett Harnett, Carlos Aguilar, MD, and Nita Walker, MD. Lora Arduser, PhD, McMicken College of Arts and Sciences, was also a contributor.

Gregory Y.H. Lip, MD, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, England, contributed to this research. Lip has served as a consultant for Bayer, Astellas, Merck, Sanofi, BMS/Pfizer, Boehringer Ingelheim, Daiichi-Sankyo, Medtronic and Sanofi Aventis. Matthew Flaherty has served as a consultant for Boehringer Ingelheim and has served on an advisory board for, as a consultant to, and on a speaker's program for CSL Behring.

The research was supported in part by grants from Bristol-Meyers Squibb/Pfizer Education Consortium, Pfizer Medical Education Group, Informed Medical Decisions Foundation and the National Institutes of Health/National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences.

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