The School of Medicine and the Hewlett-Packard Company are establishing a Cardiovascular Outcomes Research Center at The Johns Hopkins Hospital to improve heart-patient care.

HP intends to fund the center for five years, and Hopkins will provide dedicated staff.

The center, the first of its kind, will evaluate traditional and new methods and technologies used in the diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular disease, starting with heart failure. It will focus its research on such work processes in cardiology as patient monitoring and imaging.

"The goal of the Cardiovascular Outcomes Research Center is to analyze clinical outcomes both in terms of patient well-being and cost effectiveness, and to design the most effective diagnostic strategies and treatment protocols,' said Kenneth Baughman, director of Cardiology. "Objective evaluation of advances in medical care will facilitate decision making that will, ultimately, improve patient outcomes.

"Our first area of evaluation will be heart failure," Baughman said. "In conjunction with a new cardiac step-down unit that we plan to open this summer, we will focus initially on the impact of caring for chronic heart patients, who are readmitted to the hospital repeatedly and often unnecessarily."

In addition to the five-year funding, HP plans to equip Hopkins' new cardiac step-down unit with state-of-the-art patient-monitoring and point-of-care diagnostics equipment for the first research project.