Duke, Cerner Partner on Cardiac Risk Calculator App
EHR vendor Cerner has collaborated with Duke Clinical Research Institute to develop a SMART-on-FHIR atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) Risk Calculator app, designed to increase communication about ways to live a healthier life and risk factors for heart disease and stroke.
The app helps providers estimate 10-year and lifetime ASCVD risk for patients based on information such as age, race, sex, blood pressure, cholesterol levels, smoking status and diabetes status. If untreated, ASCVD can lead to heart attack and sudden cardiac arrest, as well as fatal and nonfatal stroke. The app was designed to factor in a person’s willingness to take action to improve their health and the risks and benefits of potential therapies.
“Guidelines from the American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association now emphasize using the 10-year calculator to identify adults for statin therapy,” said Pierre Elias, M.D. cardiology fellow at Columbia University and former medical student at Duke University School of Medicine, in a prepared statement. “We wanted an app that would make it easier for clinicians to calculate risk at the point of care. Whether it’s the primary care clinic or a cardiologist’s office, I can’t tell you the number of times this can get missed when there are so many other problems to manage. Making it faster and easier to get news you can use leads to better patient care.”
Duke Clinical Research Institute worked with Cerner to develop the software through the Cerner Open Developer Experience (code). Duke physicians provided clinical direction to create an app that could be embedded within Cerner’s EHR. Cerner wrote, maintains and hosts the ASCVD Risk Calculator under an open source license.
“We developed the app to be able to pull important patient health data across multiple EHR suppliers at different venues of care in order to get a full picture of how to improve that patient’s health,” said Ann Marie Navar, M.D., assistant professor of Medicine (Cardiology) at Duke University School of Medicine and member of the Duke Clinical Research Institute who led the collaboration, in a statement. “Cerner’s open platform encourages collaboration, which will help advance the way care is delivered regardless of the specific platform people are using.”
The ASCVD Risk Calculator app is available to providers in the SMART App Gallery and the Cerner Open Developer Experience (code) App Gallery.
