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This study sought to better understand the discrepant results of 2 trials of serelaxin on acute heart failure (AHF) and short-term mortality after AHF by analyzing causes of death of patients in the RELAX-AHF-2 (Efficacy, Safety and Tolerability of Serelaxin When Added to Standard Therapy in AHF-2) trial.

Behavioral challenges are often present in human illness, so behavioral economics is increasingly being applied in healthcare settings to better understand why patients choose healthy or unhealthy behaviors. The application of behavioral economics to healthcare settings parallels recent shifts in policy and reimbursement structures that hold providers accountable for outcomes that are dependent on patient behaviors. Numerous studies have examined the application of behavioral economics principles to policy making and health behaviors, but there are limited data on applying these concepts to the management of chronic conditions, such as heart failure (HF). Given its increasing prevalence and high associated cost of care, HF is a paradigm case for studying novel approaches to improve health care; therefore, if we can better understand why patients with HF make the choices they do, then we may be more poised to help them manage their medications, influence daily behaviors, and encourage healthy decision making. In this article, we will give a brief explanation of the core behavioral economics concepts that apply to patients with HF. We will also examine how to craft these concepts into tools such as financial incentives and social networks that may improve the management of patients with HF. We believe that behavioral economics can help us understand barriers to change, encourage positive behaviors, and offer additional approaches to improving the outcomes of patients with HF.

Acute heart failure (HF) is a major public health problem with substantial associated economic costs. Because most patients who present to hospitals are admitted irrespective of their level of risk, novel approaches to manage acute HF are needed, such as the use of same-day access clinics for outpatient diuresis and observation units from the emergency department. Current published data lacks a comprehensive overview of the present state of acute HF management in various clinical settings. This review summarizes the strengths and limitations of acute HF care in the outpatient and emergency department settings. Finally, a variety of innovative technologies that have the potential to improve acute HF management are discussed.

Telehealth offers an innovative approach to improve heart failure care that expands beyond traditional management strategies. Yet the use of telehealth in heart failure is infrequent because of several obstacles. Fundamentally, the evidence is inconsistent across studies of telehealth interventions in heart failure, which limits the ability of cardiologists to make general conclusions. Where encouraging evidence exists, there are logistical challenges to broad-scale implementation as a result of insufficient understanding of how to transform telemedicine strategies into clinical practice effectively. Ultimately, when implementation is reasonable, the application of these efforts remains hampered by regulatory, reimbursement, and other policy issues. The primary aim of this paper is to describe these challenges and to outline a path forward to apply telehealth approaches to heart failure in conjunction with payment reform and pragmatic research study design.

The article advocates for a patient-centered approach to the U.S. health care system that can lead to improved patient engagement and lower health care costs.

This study assessed the comparative frequency of precipitating clinical factors leading to hospitalization among heart failure (HF) patients with reduced, borderline, and preserved ejection fraction (EF)

The authors sought to describe characteristics, treatments, and in-hospital outcomes of hospitalized heart failure (HF) patients stratified by etiology.

Supplemental Digital Content is available in the text.

Supplemental Digital Content is available in the text.

QRS prolongation is associated with adverse outcomes in mostly white populations, but its clinical significance is not well established for other groups. We investigated the association between QRS duration and mortality in African Americans.

Hospital readmission is an important clinical outcome of patients with heart failure. Its relation to length of stay for the initial hospitalization is not clear.

The study sought to derive and validate risk-prediction tools from a large nationwide registry linked with Medicare claims data.

Little is known as to whether long-term outcomes of acute ischemic stroke (AIS) vary by raceethnicity. Using the American Heart Association Get With The Guidelines–Stroke registry linked with Medicare claims data set, we examined whether 30-day and 1-year outcomes differed by raceethnicity among older patients with AIS.

Comparative effectiveness reviews offer a systematic method to critically appraise existing research and to identify unaddressed clinical areas in cardiovascular disease where significant morbidity, mortality, and variation in the use of resources persist. To delineate and help select areas where comparative effectiveness reviews are needed, the Effective Health Care Program of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality involved stakeholders in prioritization of the research agenda.

The transition of scientific knowledge from discovery into practice is less than ideal. A key step in this translation occurs when presentations from major meetings are published in peer-reviewed literature, yet the completeness and speed of this process are not known. We performed a systematic and automated evaluation of rates, timing, and correlates of publication from scientific abstracts presented at 3 major cardiovascular conferences.

Composite indices of health care performance are an aggregation of underlying individual performance measures and are increasingly being used to rank hospitals. We sought to conduct an observational analysis to determine the influence of the opportunity-based and all-or-none composite performance measures on hospital rankings.

Supplemental Digital Content is available in the text.

Supplemental Digital Content is available in the text.

Background:Because little is known about Asian American patients with heart failure (HF), we compared clinical profiles, quality of care, and outcomes between Asian American and non-Hispanic white HF patients using data from the American Heart Association Get With The Guidelines-Heart Failure (GWTG-HF) program.