The ambition of the DCVA is to reduce the cardiovascular disease burden by 25% in 2023 by detecting cardiovascular disease detected earlier, developing solutions faster and bringing them to patients faster. In 2022, the DCVA mapped out how it can support its partners in evaluating and improving existing care by contributing to a multidisciplinary approach based on knowledge gaps from everyday medical practice. The Federatie Medisch Specialisten (FMS) supports medical specialist associations in drafting a knowledge agenda and publishes all knowledge agendas on its website. The Dutch General Practitioners Association (NHG) also keeps track of its knowledge gaps in the National Research Agenda on General Medicine. The knowledge gaps of DCVA partners exist in all areas surrounding prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular disease.
Knowledge gaps research agendas differ from other research agendas in that they do not primarily focus on the development of new solutions that can be applied in the future, but on the evaluation and optimization of care already in practice. Within these knowledge gaps of the professional associations that partner with the DCVA, many questions involve coherence and overlap between the questions because they involve care for a specific patient group in which different specialists work together.
The DCVA sees this as an opportunity. With this report, we highlight the knowledge gaps and identify knowledge gaps in which the DCVA can facilitate and catalyze the bringing together of different medical disciplines and initiate interdisciplinary research.
The full report can be found below.