VASCULAR CURES

Our vision is a world where everyone has the opportunity to enjoy vascular health. Vascular Cures advances our shared goal of collaboratively reducing the burden of vascular disease by convening & aligning key stakeholders around critical needs. We are connecting decision-makers, enabling resource collection & sharing to accelerate solutions, and promoting patient engagement to improve research & care. Our approach to improving vascular healthcare is both for the patient and with the patient – meaning that patient engagement is integral to everything that we do. Through this work we aim to:

- Educate the general public on vascular conditions to improve disease diagnosis and management, especially in vulnerable/at-risk communities
- Empower patients and caregivers on their vascular health journeys through education and engagement
- Fund high-risk, high-impact patient-centric research that can lead to critical new knowledge, technologies, and/or improvements in care
- Engage advocates across healthcare to serve as advisors to researchers and leaders of other national initiatives aiming to improve patient outcomes, but lacking the patient perspective

Ultimately, we want to enable better treatments and care that more closely align with patient needs, moving us closer to a world where everyone has the opportunity to enjoy vascular health.

Vascular Cures is advancing patient-centered research, catalyzing breakthrough collaborations, and empowering patients. These important strategies translate into a number of programs and initiatives:

Education and Awareness: We are creating a gold-standard for vascular educational content that is extremely accessible by directly delivering proprietary content that is interpretable at low reading levels that are patient-centric. Materials such as flyers, videos, and social media posts are all designed and written with the patient in mind and are often co-developed with and/or reviewed by patient advisors.

Patients as Partners: This program recruits, trains, and engages patients and caregivers to advocate for patients like them in national healthcare initiatives and research. Patient Partners make decision-making more patient-centric by advising in activities like trial design, development of educational materials, and clinical guideline updates.

Patient-Centered Research: The Collaborative Patient-Centered Research (CPCR) grants fund multi-institutional high-impact projects that create shareable research assets and generate milestones within two years. Each year, grants are awarded to promising initiatives which promote collaboration and patient-centricity in design and implementation. The Wylie Scholar Program is building a pipeline of innovators in vascular health. We provide 3-year career development grants to outstanding young vascular surgeon-scientists who combine active patient care with academic research.

Vascular Health Impact Network: The Vascular Health Impact Network (VHIN) is a first-of-its-kind forum for leaders in vascular care and research to collaboratively address pressing patient needs, align shared interests, and leverage the expertise of this uniquely diverse community. Members include decision-makers representing the key perspectives in vascular care and research including academia, care providers, researchers, regulators, payers, and most importantly, patient advocates. Our annual Innovation Summits bring these leaders together to discuss and prioritize healthcare needs, which Vascular Cures then advances through grants and special initiatives. The current priority is addressing vascular health inequities in vulnerable communities.

Working Groups: Vascular Cures is a leader in convening diverse stakeholder groups to collectively address priority issues that affect care and research, and ultimately vascular patients. One of our recent working groups engaged clinicians, researchers, patients, and caregivers on Patient-Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) for PAD. Our ongoing Chronic Limb-Threatening Ischemia (CLTI) Working Group is developing resources and building capacity to promote and facilitate patient engagement in research.

Given our ability to pursue solutions without proprietary interests, Vascular Cures is uniquely able to drive collaborations that accelerate patient-centered results. Our national network of experts represents more than 100 premier medical institutions, government agencies and industry leaders across North America. As a neutral and trusted member of the vascular health ecosystem, Vascular Cures facilitates novel collaborations between the most influential parties in healthcare including patients, health systems, payers, biopharma, device manufacturers, multiple care specialties, researchers and regulatory agencies.

Vascular Cures is composed of a small but dedicated team, whose commitment to patient-centric research and care has enabled innovative and effective programmatic work. Combining several areas of expertise, the Vascular Cures team masterfully develops and maintains relationships with several kinds of stakeholders, including patient partners, and leverages these relationships to bolster collaborative research, education, awareness, and empowerment.

Vascular Cures drives change within our mission pillars: empowerment, collaboration, & cures. We have impacted the lives of patients and caregivers by empowering them to advocate for themselves and their communities and catalyzing collaborative patient-centered research projects to improve quality of life. Highlights of our impact include:

Empowerment: Every year over 200,000 people around the world visit our website to learn about vascular disease and access critical resources. Our patient advocates have improved over 20 research, education, and public health initiatives as advisors.

Collaboration: Our Innovation Summits have launched 10 collaborative, high-impact research projects and special patient initiatives. We convene our network of 120 leading vascular healthcare and research organizations with patients to advance high-need solutions.

Cures: We have invested over $13M in high-impact, patient-centered research. Our career development grant recipients have generated $107M in additional research funding, a 30:1 return on investment.

Vascular Cures has ambitious goals for the future as well. We are growing our Patients as Partners program to engage more advocates and external partners to improve more projects. We intend to expand our reach to include even more diverse and representative patients, so that every voice can be heard when decisions are being made about healthcare. We’re also building our own internal resources to educate, train, and empower patient advocates.

The Vascular Health Impact Network will continue to advance conversations and projects to address vascular health inequities. Our hope is to continue to diversify this network, specifically engaging more primary and community-based care representatives. The Network convenes to discuss essential topics related to vascular care and research, and this informs both research and non-research grants for patient-centric projects. By including more stakeholders and increasing the scope of our grants, Vascular Cures plays a role in improving research and care in terms of collaboration and patient-centricity.

Expanding our reach into at-risk communities to raise awareness and education around vascular health is a continual goal. We have just launched a two-year national PAD empowerment initiative that focuses on vulnerable communities. Other ongoing objectives include improving our education & awareness materials by conducting gap analyses and consequently co-developing or updating materials with patients to ensure their needs are being met (e.g. translating resources into other languages). We are also building a network of community-based organizations in order to better reach underserved communities across the country. This network will function to co-develop and implement lifestyle management models for patients with vascular diseases such as PAD.

In the future, we will expand national presence across industry leaders, patients, researchers, and healthcare partners.