Care Innovations: Introducing the OUTPACE Framework for Health Care Quality Improvement.

Abstract

Equitable, timely, and evidence-based care remains a central goal across health care ecosystems, yet significant quality gaps, care variability, and health disparities persist. Professional societies, including the American Heart Association, have long developed clinical practice guidelines to provide standardized, evidence-based recommendations across the cardiovascular care continuum. These guidelines are operationalized into quality measures to monitor care, identify gaps, and guide improvement. Professional societies, agencies, and health systems have applied implementation science strategies, such as education, data sharing, and evaluation, to improve care quality and achieve quality measures defined in the clinical practice guidelines. American Heart Association's Get With The Guidelines programs target inpatient quality measures for stroke, heart failure, atrial fibrillation, resuscitation, and coronary artery disease, complemented by ambulatory quality improvement programs to support seamless care transitions. Decades of Get With The Guidelines implementation have enabled American Heart Association teams and volunteers to refine these programs, improving guideline adherence at local, regional, and national levels. Lessons learned informed the development of the Observe, Uncover, Trial, Personalize, Accelerate, Check, Expand Framework, designed to guide successful quality improvement initiatives. While existing quality improvement frameworks provide structured approaches, many are costly, slow, or siloed, limiting rapid-cycle, data-driven innovation across diverse health systems. The Observe, Uncover, Trial, Personalize, Accelerate, Check, Expand framework addresses these limitations as an adaptable model, applicable across care settings, disease areas, patient populations, system size, budgets, and target end points. Here, we illustrate the Observe, Uncover, Trial, Personalize, Accelerate, Check, Expand framework through 2 recent American Heart Association programs: Target: Aortic Stenosis and the IMPLEMENT-HF initiative, demonstrating its utility in guiding effective, scalable quality improvement.