Cardiovascular Intervention Improvement Telemedicine Study

Study Summary

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death in the United States; more than 80% of veterans have \> 2 risk factors for CVD. Our study is one of the first to examine the implementation of a tailored behavioral/educational self-management intervention in primary care clinics designed to improve CVD risk. The proposed study could result in a leap forward in CVD risk management among veterans for several reasons: 1) ) This is a novel extension of our previous interventions that have demonstrated improved BP, now designed to address multiple chronic conditions contributing to CVD risk, particularly hyperlipidemia and diabetes. The study focuses on both multiple CVD-related risk factor management and medication management 2) The intervention is multi-behavioral; it addresses patients' various health behavior (e.g., smoking, diet, and medication adherence). 3) Components of the intervention will include specific recommendations and transportability of intervention application software and tracking packages that will allow clinic managers to implement the intervention if it is effective.

Primary Outcome

Components of the Framingham include gender, age fixed at baseline, systolic blood pressure (presence/absence of blood pressure medications at each time point \[combination of administrative med data pull and self-report at assessment\]), total cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, smoking status (assessed via self-report at each study survey), and diabetes (diabetes is a combination of self-report and VA Computerized Patient Record System (CPRS) data review). "New cases" of diabetes are allowed to be u

Interventions

• BEHAVIORAL Pharmacist CVD