Stanford Team Receives Grant from American Heart Association

A team at Stanford University has received a $5 million research grant from the American Heart Association – Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute.

The grant will fund development of a new shared decision-making tool that will be available as a downloadable application and address many barriers such as health literacy.  The comparative effectiveness studies will be conducted at multiple institutions across the country including East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina and Ochsner Health Care System in New Orleans, Louisiana. The teams hope to “to help patients with atrial fibrillation and their clinicians engage in a meaningful conversation and collectively arrive at the best individual choice for the use of oral anticoagulants.”

The Stanford team will be led by Randall S. Stafford, MD, PhD, professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Center (SPRC) and the director of the Program on Prevention Outcomes and Practices (PPOP), and Paul J. Wang, MD, professor of cardiovascular medicine and director of the Stanford Arrhythmia Service.  

Other members of the Stanford team include Bryant Lin, MD, clinical associate professor of primary care and population health, who will be the Training Director, Kenneth Mahaffey, MD, professor of cardiovascular medicine, who will be Clinical Coordinating Center Director, Ying Lu, PhD, professor of biomedical data science, who will serve as Data Coordinating Center Director. There are also a number of collaborators, including Mintu Turakhia, MD, MAS, associate professor of cardiovascular medicine at the Palo Alto VA, Abraham Verghese, MD, MACP,   Linda Meier and Joan Lane provostial professor of medicine, Paul Heidenreich, MD, professor of cardiovascular medicine at the Palo Alto VA, Amol Rajmane, MD, and Lee Sanders, MD, MPH, associate professor of pediatrics.