Dhiren Patel, PharmD, CDCES, BC-ADM, BCACP: Welcome to this Medical Economics® Around the Practice presentation, “Multidisciplinary Lipid Management for Prevention of Cardiovascular Risks.” I am your host, Dr Dhiren Patel, adjunct associate professor of pharmacy practice at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in Boston, and an endocrine clinical pharmacy specialist. Joining me today are: Dr Deepak Bhatt, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts; Dr Robert Busch, director of clinical research at the Community Endocrine Group in Albany, New York; Dr Jennifer Goldman, professor of pharmacy practice at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy in Boston; and Joyce Ross, certified registered nurse practitioner and clinical lipid specialist with concentrated training in preventive cardiology from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Thank you all for joining me today. We’re going to start at the 10,000-foot overview and talk a bit about hypercholesterolemia and cardiovascular risk reduction. Joyce, Jen, I know you guys have practiced in a variety of different clinics over the years and have participated in a lot of not, only interdisciplinary research, but interdisciplinary practice. So maybe you guys can start. Joyce, you can start off talking a little about the burden of cardiovascular disease. And then Jen, maybe you can talk a little about that interdisciplinary practice. Joyce, we’ll start with you.

Joyce Ross, MSN, RNC, CRNP, CS, FNLA, FPCNA: Thank you very much for the opportunity to be here and work with all of you on this program today. This is a very important question. If we’re talking about the burden of cardiovascular disease, what comes to mind first to me is I believe that there’s an inertia both in the patient population as well as, unfortunately, the medical population. It seems we’ve had so many changes of what our targets are, what our thresholds are over a period of time. For the primary practitioner, and others, it may be difficult to keep up with all the changes. I sometimes think that maybe a provider says the patient is on a statin, go and sin no more, and we don’t do as much as we could. I think the other part is, so many people have familial hypercholesterolemia. And of course, that’s been one of my areas of interest over the last 25 years. Most of them do not know they have a problem until they have an event. Then, of course, we have the opportunity to capture the rest of the family. But I think the inertia that I was talking about, if we could get people to go in for well visits, which of course has been sabotaged over the pandemic, we would be able to get people before they have their disease. I think cardiovascular disease is still the No. 1 killer, and we still have a long way to go.

Dhiren Patel, PharmD, CDCES, BC-ADM, BCACP: Excellent. Thank you. Jen, as you kind of think about some of these challenges that we have, I think, we’ve talked about this in the past, none of our patients just have high cholesterol, no one just has diabetes. We can see here with the panel that we have here, we have cardiology represented, primary care, endocrine, pharmacy. If you could talk a little bit about this multimorbid chronic management that we’re dealing with, and how it needs to be a team sport, as we tackle cardiovascular disease.

Transcript edited for clarity.