WESTCOP: a disease management approach to coronary artery disease

Abstract

Disease management is a systematic approach to improving care of populations of patients with specificclinical conditions. Critical to success are the formation of collaborative teams of health carestakeholders, development and promulgation of clinical practice guidelines, and performancemeasurement and feedback to providers as a process of continuous practice improvement.This article describes a disease management program for patients with coronary artery disease in aprovincial health district with a population of 180,000. It discusses the rationale and methods behindthe operationalisation of the main program elements, benefits achieved to date and challengesconfronted.