San Diego medical Interventions

It's a pleasure to be here to tell you what we've been doing to eradicate heart attacks and strokes. there's a number of medical factors that underlie what we're trying to do and they're well-known, too. they've been covered already in the discussions. cardiovascular disease continues to be the number one cause of death in our society.

In fact, in San Diego,  from heart attack alone account for nearly 5,000 persons per year. now, there are a number of risk factors that predispose the cardiovascular disease. you've heard about them already. in fact, there are several therapies that have been documented to be effective in reducing heart attacks. i often think of what ken cooper used to say. everyone's got to die at something, but there's no sense of dying something stupid. and, in fact, if we know that there are risk factors that we can reduce and we have methods to reduce them, it seems to usthat if we just implemented the strategy in San Diego that we could, in fact, reduce, if not totally eliminate, the number ofheart attacks. and so our effort in San Diego falls under the umbrella, theoverall effort of the san diego county health and human services department that has had a long-standing improvement toimprove that long-standing commitment to improve the healthof the citizens of san diego that's called live well.

San Diego county has been, we believe, uniquely effective in translating federal initiatives into local action. and we've been fortunate enough to acquire a couple of grants to help us in this regard. two of them funded by the cdc, the communities putting prevention to work grant, which is particularly focused on reducing chronic diseases by increasing hygienic life styles with physical activities, nutrition, and working in the schools. and the community transformation grant also funded by cdc focused upon making San Diego tobacco-free and reducing hypertension and cholesterol levels. San Diego has also been blessed with the beacon grant, health information grant. and the beacon grant is an award given to communities to initiate health information technology to improve the quality of healthcare. so how did we get started in well, it actually started as achieve the 90 percentile goals as regards to optimal blood pressure and optimal lipid levels. to do this we originated something we called the university of best practices. the university of best practices is a gathering of representatives of virtually every medical organization in San Diego.

It's not only physicians but nurses and administrators and health care workers and pharmacists who attend this and at monthly meetings we focus on discussing strategies that have been most successful in achieving the goals. now, for the first time we are about to share data between groups. we feel this is really an enormous step forward. you know, we joke that these university of best practice meetings, the only place that people can come and leave their guns at the door. these are all competing medical groups, and we get together to enhance the health of San diegans.