Symptom Care at Home-Heart Failure: Developing and Piloting a Symptom Monitoring and Self-Management Coaching System for Patients With Heart Failure

Keeping heart failure (HF) patients at home with a low symptom burden after hospital discharge is challenging. HF patients may suffer worsening symptoms over time without seeking medical advice leading to poor quality of life and readmission to the hospital. Evidence shows that delay in HF symptom recognition and poor self-management are associated with unplanned HF-related emergency department (ED) visits and rehospitalizations. Clinical trials aimed at preventing rehospitalization using telemonitoring of physical changes, such as daily weights, have shown limited utility.

Understanding patients' experiences of HF symptoms and engagement in appropriate self-management are key to maintaining disease stability. Cancer studies have shown that symptom burden can be effectively decreased using automated home monitoring and self-management coaching. A recent cancer study has demonstrated that patients receiving cancer chemotherapy achieved a 40% reduction in symptoms using Symptom Care at Home (SCH), a telephone-computer interface interactive voice response (IVR) system pairing patient-reported symptoms with automated real-time self-management coaching. While a few HF studies have used interventions that monitored symptoms, no studies have tested a system that monitors and provides real-time self-management coaching tailored to specific patient-reported outcomes (PRO). The objective of this study is to adapt the SCH system to HF and conduct a pilot randomized controlled trial (RCT) to assess the feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary efficacy of the Symptom Care at Home - Heart Failure (SCH-HF) system.

Participants are randomized to receive usual care consisting of automated daily monitoring, or to receive the intervention, which includes automated daily monitoring and real-time self-management coaching.