The American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association have jointly issued a comprehensive set of data standards to help clarify definitions of the cardiovascular (CV) and non-CV complications of COVID-19.
It’s the work of the ACC/AHA Task Force on Clinical Data Standards and has been endorsed by the Heart Failure Society of America and Society for Cardiac Angiography and Interventions.
There is increased importance to understanding the acute and long-term impact of COVID-19 on CV health, the writing group notes. Until now, however, there has not been “clarity or consensus” on definitions of CV conditions related to COVID-19, with different diagnostic terminologies being used for overlapping conditions, such as “myocardial injury,” “myocarditis,” “type Il myocardial infarction,” “stress cardiomyopathy,” and “inflammatory cardiomyopathy,” they point out.
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“We, as a research community, did some things right and some things wrong surrounding the COVID pandemic,” Sandeep Das, MD, MPH, vice chair of the writing group, noted in an interview with this news organization.
“The things that we really did right is that everybody responded with enthusiasm, kind of all hands on deck with a massive crisis response, and that was fantastic,” Dr. Das said.
“However, because of the need to hurry, we didn’t structure and organize in the way that we typically would for something that was sort of a slow burn kind of problem rather than an emergency. One of the consequences of that was fragmentation of how things are collected, reported, et cetera, and that leads to confusion,” he added.
The report was published simultaneously June 23 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology and Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes.
A necessary but not glamorous project
The new data standards for COVID-19 will help standardize definitions and set the framework to capture and better understand how COVID-19 affects CV health.
“It wasn’t exactly a glamorous-type project but, at the same time, it’s super necessary to kind of get everybody on the same page and working together,” Dr. Das said.
Broad agreement on common vocabulary and definitions will help with efforts to pool or compare data from electronic health records, clinical registries, administrative datasets, and other databases, and determine whether these data apply to clinical practice and research endeavors, the writing group says.
They considered data elements relevant to the full range of care provided to COVID-19 patients in all care settings. Among the key items included in the document are:
- Case definitions for confirmed, probable, and suspected acute COVID-19, as well as postacute sequelae of COVID-19.
- Definitions for acute CV complications related to COVID-19, including acute myocardial injury, heart failure, shock, arrhythmia, thromboembolic complications, and .
- Data elements related to COVID-19 vaccination status, comorbidities, and preexisting CV conditions.
- Definitions for postacute CV sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection and long-term CV complications of COVID-19.
- Data elements for CV mortality during acute COVID-19.
- Data elements for non-CV complications to help document severity of illness and other competing diagnoses and complications that might affect CV outcomes.
- A list of symptoms and signs related to COVID-19 and CV complications.
- Data elements for diagnostic and therapeutic strategies for COVID-19 and CV conditions.
- A discussion of advanced therapies, including , extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, and end-of-life management strategies.
These data standards will be useful for researchers, registry developers, and clinicians, and they are proposed as a framework for ICD-10 code development of COVID-19–related CV conditions, the writing group says.
The standards are also of “great importance” to patients, clinicians, investigators, scientists, administrators, public health officials, policymakers, and payers, the group says.
Dr. Das said that, although there is no formal plan in place to update the document, he could see sections that might be refined.
“For example, there’s a nice long list of all the various variants, and unfortunately, I suspect that that is going to change and evolve over time,” Dr. Das told this news organization.
“We tried very hard not to include things like specifying specific treatments so we didn’t get proscriptive. We wanted to make it descriptive, so hopefully it will stand the test of time pretty well,” he added.
This research had no commercial funding. The writing group has no relevant disclosures.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.