A UCLA-led study has found that a new performance-intervention program significantly improved adherence to national guideline–recommended therapies for heart failure patients in outpatient settings.
Heart failure is a chronic, progressive disease that impacts millions and results in morbidity, death, the use of significant health care resources, and substantial costs. And while scientific research and national guidelines have demonstrated the effectiveness of specific therapies for heart failure patients, these treatments are still underused.
Although several programs have helped improve heart-failure patient care in hospitals, the current intervention is the largest performance-improvement program on the use of national guideline–related therapies in outpatient clinic settings.
The findings are published in the July 26 online edition of the journal Circulation.
The new program, called the Registry to Improve the Use of Evidence-Based Heart Failure Therapies in the Outpatient Setting (IMPROVE HF), provided key interventions, including clinical decision support tools, structured improvement strategies and medical-chart audits with feedback to help the clinics adhere to heart failure therapies — including the use of recommended medications and devices — that have been proven to help improve patient mortality and outcomes.
“We found substantial, clinically relevant improvement in the number of patients receiving key treatments after introducing this new performance-improvement intervention program at the clinics,” said the study’s first author, Dr. Gregg Fonarow, UCLA’s Eliot Corday Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine and Science and director of the Ahmanson–UCLA Cardiomyopathy Center at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
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