Shirley Kuta insists she’ll live to 100, and she credits her “heart team” — a group of medical staff who have monitored her diet, exercise and medication since she had a heart attack in 2000.
Kuta, 72, is part of a Colorado program so successful it’s attracting national attention from officials steering health care reform.
Mortality rates among heart-disease patients in the Kaiser Permanente program were 76 percent lower over a nine-year period compared with patients not enrolled.
Central to the program are electronic medical records — linking patient care from cardiologist to nurse to pharmacist to dietician to exercise physiologist.
“We don’t operate in that clinical vacuum,” said pharmacist Jon Rasmussen, chief of Kaiser’s clinical pharmacy cardiovascular services in Colorado. “There is information flowing between the teams all the time.”
It’s the program’s use of technology, as well as its team approach, that has caught the interest of federal officials charged with handing out stimulus dollars. The stimulus package includes $19 billion to modernize health information technology.
A Kaiser pharmacist and registered nurse were invited to Washington, D.C., this week to talk to the Alliance for Health Care Reform and Senate Finance Committee staff.
The program — called collaborative cardiac care service — involves contacting Kaiser patients who have survived a heart attack or heart surgery, usually within about 24 hours.
Through check-ups, lab tests and telephone calls, clinicians help patients manage their coronary artery disease, which is the leading cause of death in the United States. Patients learn what to eat, how to quit smoking, how much to exercise and what medications to take.
They typically tackle one or two lifestyle changes at a time.
“If we ask them to do everything at once, we’re not always successful,” said Susan Kuca, a registered nurse and coordinator of the cardiac rehabilitation department. “They may be ready to start exercising and quit smoking, but because they are trying to quit smoking, they might not want to be working on dieting and weight loss.”
Nurses sometimes send patients to smoking-cessation classes, dieticians or an exercise physiologist.
The study that linked program participation to decreased risk of death included 4,896 patients from 1996 to 2004. Kaiser now has 12,500 people with heart disease enrolled in the program, which is free.
Kuta looks forward to calls from her pharmacist, who adjusts her medications for cholesterol, thyroid disease and blood pressure. This week, he told her to start taking fish oil.
“He makes sure my heart is protected, let me tell ya,” she said. “He’s a wonderful person.”
Nurses taught Kuta to read food labels for sodium, fats and sugars. Since her heart attack, she eats more olive oil, chicken and fish, and she hasn’t smoked a cigarette.
“I call them my heart team, and I pay attention to what they tell me,” she said. “If you want to live, you have to do what they say.”
Jennifer Brown: 303-954-1593 or jenbrown@denverpost.com
