The increasingly well-informed health consumer will have a big impact on healthcare, which is a development that should be embraced. This is one of the topics of the Madrid Declaration, published in the European Heart Journal, by 76 heart doctors and health care experts.

The Declaration makes clear that a public with better knowledge about cardiovascular diseases (CVD) will improve the quality of care. It also emphasises that this does not happen automatically. It requires access to good information to make change. In the immediate future, consumer-driven healthcare will be the rule in a society consisting of better informed citizens. Efforts to assess the values of preferences in the population regarding health and healthcare should be encouraged. To create reliable and stable Internet-sources of information to the public would be far better than the arbitrary coverage of different cures done by the media or promoted in advertisement towards the consumers. Medical guidelines are an important way to improve healthcare and the implementation of guidelines should be a benchmark tool for CVD clinics.

This message was part of the conclusion of an expert conference organized in June 2006 in Madrid by the European Society of Cardiology looking into European CVD care of the 21st century. Johan Hjertqvist lectured at this conference and contributed to the content of the declaration.