Stagnant and declining payment for Medicare services exacerbates financial uncertainty for health systems and practices and furthers disparities in care delivery. The cost of operating a practice has increased dramatically while physician payment has steeply declined. There is an urgent need to implement policies to stabilize the payment system and recognize the value of clinicians' work.

Appropriate and meaningful patient engagement in care can have a positive impact on health outcomes. The ACC recommends supporting patient care that is facilitated through shared decision-making and merges stratification and evidence-based treatment options with patient preferences.

The College also emphasizes the importance of reducing barriers to early specialty referral and treatment planning to promote systematic patient identification and ensure access to care for patients with suspected or newly diagnosed complex cardiovascular disease.

Ensuring patients have access to high-quality and continuous care is a critical factor in optimizing care delivery and outcomes.

The ACC recommends several actions to make this vision a reality, such as streamlining prior authorization practices; expanding telehealth access through permanent flexibilities; incentivizing effective ambulatory and virtual specialty care; establishing flexibility for aligned incentives across specialties and various health care providers; encouraging accountable, team-based, interdisciplinary multispecialty care; and supporting purposeful operations, data infrastructure and concurrent analytics to manage patient populations in real-time and facilitate timely intervention.