American Heart Association expands outpatient recognition across all 50 states
For the first time, the American Heart Association is recognizing outpatient care organizations in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico for efforts to improve management of high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and Type 2 diabetes. The reach of the 2026 recognition program is large, but the clinical message is narrower and more urgent: most cardiovascular prevention still lives or dies in ambulatory care, where medication titration, adherence counseling, and repeated risk-factor checks determine whether patients drift toward events or move away from them.
The Association tied the announcement to its 2026 Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics Report, which estimates that cardiovascular disease affects 130.6 million U.S. adults. In practical terms, that burden means risk-factor control cannot be treated as a side project. It is the core work of prevention, especially when blood pressure, LDL management, and diabetes care interact to accelerate vascular injury over years and, in some patients, over much shorter intervals.
More than 2,700 healthcare organizations are being recognized through Outpace CVD™, the American Heart Association’s outpatient quality improvement portfolio. Collectively, those organizations serve nearly 45.5 million patients. More than 1,750 organizations earned recognition in more than one Outpace CVD program, a detail that suggests many care teams are not managing these conditions in isolation; they are building integrated workflows that address overlapping cardiometabolic risk.
Blood pressure, cholesterol, and diabetes remain the outpatient front line
Kevin Hwang, M.D., MPH, volunteer chair of the American Heart Association’s Outpatient Quality Improvement Advisory Group, framed the effort around a basic clinical truth: the biggest opportunities to improve cardiovascular health often begin outside the hospital. In outpatient medicine, the physician visit is only one part of the intervention. Accurate measurement, repeat follow-up, medication adjustment, patient education, and team-based surveillance do much of the real preventive work.
For 2026, nearly 2,700 organizations earned Target: BP™ recognition. The scale matters because high blood pressure remains one of the most common and most modifiable cardiovascular threats in the United States, affecting 125.9 million adults. Yet only 22% have it under control. Those numbers define a familiar but still unresolved clinical problem: a condition that is easy to diagnose in theory, often silent in daily life, and still unevenly controlled across routine care settings.
The physiologic stakes are straightforward. Persistent elevation in arterial pressure increases endothelial stress, promotes left ventricular remodeling, and raises the risk of stroke, myocardial infarction, heart failure, and kidney injury. Better outpatient control is not just a metric for quality dashboards. It is the difference between chronic vascular injury and the possibility of sustained risk reduction.
Recognition programs are built around clinical process, not ceremony
The American Heart Association’s outpatient portfolio uses evidence-based quality improvement resources to help organizations improve management of blood pressure, cholesterol, and diabetes. Target: BP focuses on accurate measurement, evidence-based treatment, and better blood pressure control. Check. Change. Control. Cholesterol™ recognized almost 1,000 organizations for efforts to improve cholesterol management. Target: Type 2 Diabetes℠ recognized more than 1,700 organizations for addressing cardiovascular risk factors through evidence-based quality improvement and guideline-directed care.
Each of those programs targets a different entry point into the same pathobiology. Lipid lowering reduces the substrate for atherosclerotic plaque formation and progression. Blood pressure control reduces mechanical injury to the vasculature. Diabetes management lowers the glycemic and metabolic stress that compounds endothelial dysfunction and accelerates atherosclerotic disease. In combination, these interventions are meant to interrupt the pathway that turns common chronic disease into infarction, stroke, and premature disability.
One line from the announcement lands with particular force: cardiovascular disease remains a leading health threat for people with Type 2 diabetes. Patients with diabetes do not simply carry a glucose problem; they carry a higher vascular risk state in which coronary, cerebrovascular, and peripheral disease emerge more readily and often more aggressively. For that reason, diabetes care that ignores blood pressure and cholesterol misses the biology of the disease.
Hwang said the organizations being recognized are demonstrating how evidence-based care can improve cardiovascular health and patient outcomes. In outpatient medicine, “evidence-based” is not an abstract label. It generally means standardizing measurement, closing treatment gaps, intensifying therapy when goals are not met, and using repeated encounters to convert guidelines into day-to-day control.
Scale, integration, and the care gap still ahead
The breadth of this year’s recognition is unusual. Organizations from every state, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico are included, which gives the program a national footprint rather than a regional one. Nearly 45.5 million patients are seen by participating organizations, and more than 1,750 organizations appear across multiple Outpace CVD programs. Those figures point to a health system that is increasingly aware that cardiometabolic prevention cannot be siloed. A patient with hypertension often also has dyslipidemia, and many patients with diabetes will need both lipid and blood pressure management to meaningfully reduce risk.
Still, the numbers also point to the size of the remaining gap. When 125.9 million adults live with high blood pressure and only 22% have it under control, recognition programs can reward progress, but they do not erase the burden. The same is true for cholesterol and diabetes management. The work ahead sits in the messy middle of practice: missed visits, therapeutic inertia, access barriers, and inconsistent follow-up.
That is why outpatient quality improvement remains clinically consequential. These programs are not about ceremony; they are about workflow, measurement, and accountability. They attempt to make prevention repeatable in the places where patients are actually seen, rather than relying on episodic care after disease has already declared itself in the emergency department or the cath lab.
The American Heart Association says each year Outpace CVD supports thousands of healthcare organizations working to improve cardiovascular health in communities nationwide. The unresolved issue is how consistently those gains can be translated into lower event rates over time, especially across populations that still face uneven access to longitudinal care. For now, the clearest signal is the scale of the outpatient effort itself: prevention is being pushed farther upstream, into routine care, where cardiovascular risk is managed before it becomes irreversible disease.