Efficacy of an integrated hospital-primary care program for heart failure: a population-based analysis of 56,742 patients (original) (raw)

The efficacy of heart failure programs has been demonstrated in clinical trials but their applicability in the real world practice setting is more controversial. This study evaluates the feasibility and efficacy of an integrated hospital-primary care program for the management of patients with heart failure in an integrated health area covering a population of 309,345. For the analysis, we included all patients consecutively admitted with heart failure as the principal diagnosis who had been discharged alive from all of the hospitals in Catalonia, Spain, from 2005 to 2011, the period when the program was implemented, and compared mortality and readmissions among patients exposed to the program with the rates in the patients of all the remaining integrated health areas of the Servei Català de la Salut (Catalan Health Service). We included 56,742 patients in the study. There were 181,204 hospital admissions and 30,712 deaths during the study period. In the adjusted analyses, when comp...

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