For more than 30 years, the OAC has been working to improve cardiac patient care. In 1995, the OAC was the first professional organization in the province to create and publish standards for the performance of echocardiography services. These standards were ignored until 2009 when a working group came together to update and release them three years later under the Cardiac Care Network of Ontario (now known as CorHealth Ontario). OAC members were actively involved in developing these standards (for more information, see Standards for the Provision of Echocardiography in Ontario 2015). A key hallmark of this document is the inclusion of “appropriateness guidelines”.
A turning point for the OAC came in the spring of 2012, when the Ontario government enacted a regulation that, if implemented, would have led to the closure of half of the non-invasive cardiac testing facilities in the province. This would have seriously jeopardized patient access to cardiac care and destroyed the infrastructure for non-invasive testing that the provincial government and cardiologists had worked on together to implement since the mid-1990s.
The OAC exerted a major impact on Ontario’s political and health care landscape during this time, as cardiologists and their patients, community leaders, and members of the general public came together under an integrated advocacy program to convince government to withdraw its regulation and implement a new policy based on appropriateness standards.