Deployment of Point-of-Care Echocardiography to Improve Cardiac Diagnostic Access Among American Indians.

Background: American Indians face significant barriers to diagnosis and management of cardiovascular disease. We sought to develop a real-world implementation model for improving access to echocardiography within the Indian Health Service, the American Indian Structural Heart Disease Partnership.

Methods And Results: The American Indian Structural Heart Disease Partnership was implemented and evaluated via a 4-step process of characterizing the system where it would be instituted, building point-of-care echocardiography capacity, deploying active case finding for structural heart disease, and evaluating the approach from the perspective of the clinician and patient.