The West Virginia
Coalition for Quality Health Care is proud to announce
our newest grant-funded project. Our physicians have elected
to begin work on decreasing the variation surrounding
the treatment of heart failure in West Virginia. The study
group held a planning retreat June 2004 to look at other
heart failure projects currently in place across the country,
to hear presentations from the leaders of those projects
to determine what lessons they have learned and finally
to plan and design the scope of the heart failure project
we will undertake in West Virginia.
WVHA's Director
of Performance Improvement, Debbie Ruppert, RN will serve
as the Project Director. Other partners in this latest
Coalition effort include: the West Virginia Medical Institute
(WVMI); the WV Bureau for Public Health's Cardiovascular
Health program; physician representation from WV chapters
of the American College of Cardiology (ACC), the American
College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP); the West Virginia
State Medical Association and nursing representation from
several professional societies as well. For the first
time, we have recruited insurers and payors and hospital-based
pharmacists into the planning of our project and look
forward to what they will bring to the group.
The Heart Failure
GAP in the Mountains Project is a multi-phased project
that will optimize the use of evidence based inpatient
care with the ultimate goal of reducing 30 day readmissions
and educating patients on self-management goals to improve
quality of life and shift treatment from the acute into
the chronic area by generating a tool kit based on the
American College of Cardiology’s Guidelines Applied in
Practice for Heart Failure patients. The tools will be
used to guide inpatient care and link cardiologists, primary
care physicians and other caregivers of Heart Failure
patients to their outpatient care.
Phase I will
concentrate on acutely decompensated Heart Failure patients
requiring hospitalization. Data for the Heart Failure
project will be the same data used for JCAHO, CMS 7th
Scope of Work and voluntary Quality Initiatives.
Heart Failure
accounts for approximately 1,000,000 hospital admissions
each year. US Hospitalizations for acute decomponsated
heart failure have increased from 377,000 in 1979 to 999,999
in 2000. Heart Failure is the leading cause of admission
in persons over 65 years of age. Considering that the
average US hospital loses $1,288 per heart failure patient
admission, one can readilt see how this is draining our
valuable health care resources and straining the current
health care system.
If you would
like more information on this project, or would like to
nominate a professional from your hospital to participate
please contact Debbie Ruppert at (304) 344-9744 ext. 1729
or by email at druppert@wvha.org
Downloads:
CVH
Resource Manual/Toolkit
Standing
orders for admission, critical pathways, discharge instructions,
discharge check sheets modeled after sample documents.
(zipped file - 126kb)
