Stanford Medical Center and Kaiser Permanente were awarded a $3.89 million grant from the American Heart Association (AHA) on Monday. Meant to establish a Northern California heart research center, the grant will help pursue optimal care in cardiovascular medicine.

Stanford and Kaiser researchers will conduct large-scale observational effectiveness and safety studies for cardiovascular therapies at the center, which will be led by Mark Hlatky, professor of health research and policy and medicine, as well as Kaiser research scientist Dr. Alan Go.

The first two studies performed by the new center will use top-of-the-line analytic research methods to evaluate the effectiveness of various pharmacologic therapies and emerging technologies. These treatments include stents, defibrillators and coronary bypass.

“We want to assess the benefits of treatments as well as risks, and we want to determine whether these vary in different types of patients,” Hlatky said. “Our second goal is to identify a representative population of patients who have coronary disease or heart failure and document which treatments they are getting and how well those treatments are working.”

For the first time, the medical records databases for all of Kaiser’s 3.3 million Northern California members will be linked, allowing researchers to leverage Kaiser’s broad set of data along with the expertise of both teams.

“Investigators from Stanford and from Kaiser will both work in the center,” Hlatky said. “We will focus on analyzing data from Kaiser patients, but will be able to tap into other data sources as well to look further into interesting issues.”

Hlatky emphasized the value of using patient data to get a better sense of treatments’ efficacy.

“The findings of the center can be used to improve the quality of care, both in Kaiser and in other settings,” he said. “The linked Kaiser data will allow us to determine how well treatments work outside of the carefully controlled conditions of a clinical trial.”

The Stanford-Kaiser Permanente Cardiovascular Outcomes Research Center is one of three new centers to receive funds from the AHA to improve the nation’s cardiovascular health. The other two centers are at Duke University and UCLA.