The Redefining Heart Failure Blog

Heart failure patients are at significantly elevated risk of a COVID-19 infection, but also fully healthy individuals have a substantially elevated risk of cardiovascular complications within the first year after even a mild infection. A recent article on the Acorai blog focused on how the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic has reshaped the clinical management of heart failure,…

The consequence of Covid-19 At the outbreak of the pandemic in early 2020, there was a unanimously manifest worry among cardiologists that heart failure admissions and mortality would rise steeply. This article attempts explaining some of the causes for the significant drop in admissions and what we could learn from it in future heart failure…

Readmission Mitigation: A Summary Historical studies suggest that high-volume hospitals may have lower readmission rates for heart failure patients and the concentrations of highly specialised practitioners were the formula for readmission mitigation strategies. Recent studies, however, have shown the opposite relation – despite having proven to reduce surgery complications and hospital mortality, their readmission rates…

Practices to Reduce Readmissions? We previously categorized the causes of readmissions into the following groups; Preconditions, Lifestyle, Economic status, Treatment outcome and heart failure monitoring. Yet, when we look at the factors reducing readmission and how they relate to the causes of readmission, most causes can categorize most of them as either: Patient education measures…

Factors reducing readmission Factors that reduce rehospitalisation rates at discharge are most substantial when evaluating Post-discharge self-care and lifestyle factors. In general, self-care education is known to reduce hospital admissions for all condition types, and the effects of these interventions are also in post-discharge HF patient populations.  It is often intuitive that patient education and…

Our Current Understanding of Readmissions It is well established that patients with heart failure are at least twice as likely to be admitted for in-hospital patient stay and treatment than their age-matched population controls without heart failure. Whilst the pattern of admission and readmission for this patient population is understood, there is a gap for…

Context of Readmissions In hospital care settings, Heart Failure (HF) treatment and management are among the leading causes of in-patient admissions, conferring one of the single largest economically expensive and resource-intensive pathologies faced in modern healthcare. Of this economic burden, patient readmission makes up the most significant proportion of the costs associated with patient management,…