Laurence Sperling, MD, Katz Professor in Cardiology at Emory University School of Medicine and executive director of the Million Hearts initiative at the CDC and CMS, shared insight into the importance of community empowerment to address cardiovascular disease prevention in at-risk populations.

Sperling cochaired the 2024 Family Heart Global Summit and delivered a presentation titled “Population Health Approaches to Accelerate the Prevention of CVD: Moving from Action to Impact.” The 10th annual meeting of the Family Heart Global Summit took place September 22-24 in Dallas, Texas. Sperling’s interview took place ahead of the meeting.

Transcript

What specific population health strategies do you believe are most effective in addressing the prevention of cardiovascular disease, particularly in populations with high prevalence of familial hypercholesterolemia and elevated Lp(a) levels?

On a population health level, we need to begin with greater awareness, but awareness alone is insufficient, even if it’s awareness bidirectionally—those in the general population and then the clinicians who may be helping to care for those with hypercholesterolemia or an elevated Lp(a). Awareness must move forward to empowerment. And empowerment—if you look at successful improvements in various disease states, whether it’s related to breast cancer or HIV, really the empowerment comes from the communities themselves, as opposed to health care clinicians or even the science. Lessons learned are: if we look at the history of modern day medicine and how life is extended, it very much takes a team. And the team certainly involves what I call patient-partnered care—we talk about patient-centered care, but it must be partnered. And so partnerships are critically important, and then the essence of this boils down to safety and trust. As we build partnerships, relationships, and teams, we must work better together.

How can health care systems better measure the impact of implemented strategies on cardiovascular outcomes, and what role does data analytics play in this process?

We have great capabilities today through our electronic medical records, so I think a way to approach thinking about how to measure is we can’t measure impact if we don’t know where we start. If we don’t know where we’re starting, we don’t know where we’re going. So, we must measure, we must create cycles of improvement. And these cycles of improvement have to be very strategic.

In my presentation, I’ll be talking about moving from action to impact. And often we think about action as being driven and action making steps forward, but there’s a difference. In order to have the greatest impact, we have to be strategic, because we will always have limited resources. And so how do we focus those resources, those efforts, and how do we focus our thoughts about the capabilities in terms of effectiveness?

Thinking about where it is we hope to be in a year, 10 years, or 50 years, today we heard an amazing historical perspective about the 50 years of the discovery of the LDL [low-density lipoprotein] receptor by [Nobel Laureates Joseph Goldstein, MD, and Michael Brown, MD]. We’ve come a long way in 50 years, we’ll [also] be hearing about the discovery of PCSK9. But in order to move from these discoveries, from innovation to impact, we have to be very strategic and think about our goals and objectives, not only as individuals, but truly as a family.