2025 AHA/ACC Clinical Performance and Quality Measures for Chronic Coronary Disease

A guideline says what good care looks like. A performance measure decides whether you actually received it. This 2025 AHA/ACC document does the second job for the roughly 20.5 million Americans living with chronic coronary disease.

It translates the strongest recommendations of the 2023 chronic coronary disease guideline — the Class 1 “do this” and Class 3 “don’t do this” statements — into ten countable performance measures and three quality measures. These are the things a health system can be held to: was the patient on a statin, on antiplatelet therapy, counseled on the things that demonstrably reduce events. Performance measures are built only on the firmest evidence, because they can drive public reporting and pay-for-performance; the softer quality measures are kept separate, useful for internal improvement but not yet for scoring.

The reason this matters to a patient is the gap it targets. Guideline-directed therapy works, but a substantial fraction of eligible patients never reliably get it. Measurement is how that gap gets closed — what is counted tends to get done.

We rate the evidence very strong. It is methodologically rigorous, derived directly from high-grade guideline recommendations, and built by the joint committee whose specific job is to draw the line between what is established enough to measure and what is not.