Million Hearts

A United States national initiative co-led by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, built around the goal of preventing 1 million heart attacks and strokes within five years by improving a small set of evidence based measures of cardiovascular care summarized as the ABCS: aspirin use for those at risk, blood pressure control, cholesterol management and smoking cessation. The initiative works by bringing together community organizations, health systems, nonprofit groups, and state, federal and private sector partners around these shared clinical priorities rather than delivering care directly itself, while also supporting broader strategies to cut tobacco use, physical inactivity and exposure to particle pollution. In its first two years the initiative's partners were credited with helping prevent more than 100,000 cardiovascular events, and it was projected to contribute to preventing up to half a million such events in total.