Towards a new order in cardiovascular medicine: re-engineering through global collaboration

Cardiovascular disease is a major worldwide health threat, and the need for prevention and treatment cannot be met solely by specialists, or even by specialty-trained teams that extend beyond the limited number of physicians. While cardiovascular specialists should strive to provide high-quality, technologically sophisticated specialty care and seek to develop our academic and practice progeny in a carefully orchestrated, intensive effort, we should also lead the transition to a modern learning health system. This system will involve the global population and span national boundaries and cultural differences, allowing access to new knowledge through carefully assimilated data collected as part of practice and fed back through electronic systems. Cardiovascular specialists trained to understand this new, information-dense world can both provide excellent specialty care for sick patients, as well as proctoring the knowledge base with populations and non-specialist practitioners who will benefit from implementing practices that have been proven effective. © The Author 2009.