Evaluation of Clinical Impact of Non-Invasive Hemodynamic Monitoring to Optimize Preventative Care of Heart Failure Patients

B. BACKGROUND:

Nearly five million Americans experience heart failure (HF) and greater than 250,000 die annually. 1 The prevalence has continued to increase with the aging of the US population and HF is now the leading cause of hospitalization among adults >65 in the United states. Despite remarkable improvements in medical therapy, the prognosis of patients with myocardial failure remains poor, with almost 20% of patients dying within 1 year of initial diagnosis and > 80% 8-year mortality. 2 In addition patients who are admitted to the hospital for heart failure have over a 50% readmission rate within six months of discharge. 3,4 These patients require routine clinical care and often require diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. This project seeks to assess if the use of hemodynamic (HD) monitoring technologies (ClearSight/Nexfin) that are currently used in the intraoperative and critical care settings can provide utility by demonstrating associations between alterations in a patients HD values to the likelihood of hospital admission.

The non-invasive HD device utilized (Nexfin, Edwards Lifesciences, Irvine, CA) provided flow-guided cardiovascular parameters that were captured for each clinic visit for up to 24 months. Analysis was performed between the most recent prior clinic visits for patients who were hospitalized for HF exacerbation to those who were not hospitalized. HD data was not used to guide clinical care. A Cox hazard model using a log transformation of HD variables as the covariates, was applied to describe hospital admission.