Cardiac care quality indicators: a new hospital-level quality improvement initiative for cardiac care in Canada.

Health system stakeholders at different levels are focused more than ever on improvements to quality of care. With heart disease continuing to be a top health issue for Canadians, quality improvement initiatives aimed at improving cardiac care are increasingly important. The Cardiac Care Quality Indicators are one such initiative, with the goal of supporting cardiac care centres in their quality improvement efforts by providing comparable facility-level information on a number of cardiac quality outcome indicators. Working together, the Canadian Institute for Health Information and the Cardiac Care Network of Ontario completed the pilot project for this initiative in Ontario and British Columbia in 2010. Based on the success of the pilot, a national expansion of the initiative is currently under way. This article details some of the processes that led to the success of the project and presents some high-level, de-identified results.