Circulation
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Disease management has shown great promise as a means of reorganizing chronic care and optimizing patient outcomes. Nevertheless, disease management programs are widely heterogeneous and lack a shared definition of disease management, which limits our ability to compare and evaluate different programs. To address this problem, the American Heart Association's Disease Management Taxonomy Writing Group developed a system of classification that can be used both to categorize and compare disease management programs and to inform efforts to identify specific factors associated with effectiveness. ⋯ This statement presents a taxonomy for disease management that describes critical program attributes and allows for comparisons across interventions. Routine application of the taxonomy may facilitate better comparisons of structure, process, and outcome measures across a range of disease management programs and should promote uniformity in the design and conduct of studies that seek to validate disease management strategies.