Conference Coverage

While U.S. heart failure readmissions fall, deaths rise

Publish date: September 20, 2017

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Outpatient heart failure events supersede hospitalizations

My colleagues and I have seen in results from recent trials a changing relationship between heart failure mortality and heart failure hospitalization. In the United States in particular, where penalties exist for high rates of hospital readmissions for heart failure, we are seeing more patients treated as outpatients and we see that these “outpatient” events are associated with the same risk for subsequent mortality as we had previously seen for heart failure hospitalization.

It may be that we are keeping patients out of the hospital to avoid a financial ding, but perhaps we are keeping out patients who really should be hospitalized.

What we have begun doing in trials is to look not just at hospitalizations but also consider the incidence of other heart failure events, such as patients treated for heart failure symptoms with an intravenous diuretic in the emergency department and patients who are kept in observation rooms and are not admitted. It’s not the same as a heart failure hospitalization, but some trials are now including these other heart failure events in their primary endpoint.

^{Mitchel L. Zoler/Frontline Medical News}

Dr. Scott D. Solomon

Scott D. Solomon, MD, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of noninvasive cardiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, made these comments as chair of the session where Dr. Aziz gave his report and in an interview. He has been a consultant to and/or received research support from Alnylam, Amgen, AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Cytokinetics, GlaxoSmithKline, Ionis, Merck, Novartis, and Sanofi.

AT THE HFSA ANNUAL SCIENTIFIC MEETING

DALLAS – U.S. hospitals have recently shown a consistent and disturbing disconnect between reductions in their heart failure hospital readmission rates and heart failure mortality. Readmissions have dropped while mortality has risen.

“Despite reductions in 30-day heart failure readmissions in 89% of U.S. hospitals” during 2009-2016, “30-day heart failure mortality rates increased at 73%* of these ‘successful’ hospitals” during the same period,” Ahmad A. Abdul-Aziz, MD, said at the annual scientific meeting of the Heart Failure Society of America.

^{Mitchel L. Zoler/Frontline Medical News}

Dr. Ahmad A. Abdul-Aziz

“The most concerning question we can ask is whether inappropriate discharges from emergency rooms and observation units” is a driving factor behind the mortality rise despite a readmissions drop, said Dr. Abdul-Aziz, a cardiologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

These shifts in the outcomes of U.S. patients hospitalized for acute heart failure episodes are tied to the penalties that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services began slapping on hospitals in 2013 for excess 30-day readmissions for heart failure patients and in 2014 for excess mortality. A problem with these two CMS programs is that the penalty on inferior readmissions performance is a lot stiffer than for excess mortality, Dr. Aziz noted: a 0.2% penalty on payments for high mortality, compared with a 3% penalty for excess readmissions, a disparity that can make hospitals focus more on the readmissions side, he suggested.

Dr. Aziz’s report isn’t the first to make this observation. Study results published earlier in 2017 used CMS Medicare data from 2008 to 2014 to show that during that period, heart failure 30-day mortality rates following hospital discharge rose by 1.3%, while 30-day readmissions fell by 2.1% (JAMA. 2017 July 18;318[3]:270-8). On the basis of these numbers, as many as 5,200 additional deaths to U.S. heart failure patients in 2014 “may be related to the Hospital Readmission Reduction Program” of CMS, Gregg C. Fonarow, MD, said during a separate talk at the meeting.

^{Mitchel L. Zoler/Frontline Medical News}

Dr. Gregg C. Fonarow

“CMS thinks that policy reform is the way to improve outcomes of patients hospitalized for heart failure. There was no evidence, no results from randomized trials, but they pushed it on the country. And it has reduced readmissions. But there have been unintended consequences of gaming the system, of keeping patients out of the hospital and giving them outpatient status, and these data raise concerns because 30-day mortality went up,” said Dr. Fonarow, professor and cochief of cardiology at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We should all be extremely concerned about the unintended consequences of payment reform strategies” that aim to improve the management of patients with heart failure.

The analysis reported by Dr. Aziz included data from 3,265 U.S. hospitals for heart failure patients, and data from 1,621 hospitals that managed patients with acute MIs, another disease that the CMS has targeted for penalties based on 30-day readmissions and 30-day postdischarge mortality rates. During the 8-year period studied, heart failure 30-day readmissions fell by 2.2% while 30-day mortality rose by 1%. In contrast, among acute MI patients, readmissions fell by 3% and mortality also fell, by 2.2%, Dr. Abdul-Aziz reported.

Dr. Abdul-Aziz had no disclosures. Dr. Fonarow had been a consultant to Amgen, Janssen, Medtronic, Novartis, St. Jude, and ZS Pharma.

mzoler@frontlinemedcom.com

On Twitter @mitchelzoler

*This article was updated October 5, 2017

While U.S. heart failure readmissions fall, deaths rise

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