The Journal of the American Heart Association, the Open Access Journal of the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association, released a study May 10 revealing that the survival rate for heart failure patients is higher when they return to the same hospital that has been administering their care.
“Patients’ hospital records may not be completed for weeks and they don’t report all of the things that happened during the initial hospitalization,” Finlay McAlister, study lead author and professor of general internal medicine at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, said in the article. “For example, it is not uncommon for heart failure patients to not tolerate or have adverse responses to higher doses of some guideline-recommended medications. That information rarely appears on discharge summaries, so patients are at risk of the same thing happening if they are admitted to a different hospital."
The study examined patients in Canada from 2004 to 2013 with heart failure. The report found that out of 217,039 patients, a little more than 18 percent were readmitted within a month with a cause of continued heart failure.
“After adjusting for factors such as age and gender, heart failure patients who were readmitted to the same hospital were discharged an average of one day sooner and were 11 percent less likely to die during their hospitalization,” the report said.
Unlike the United States, Canada has universal health care; however the authors of the report said they believe the findings to be congruent with United States patients as well. Studies have shown that heart failure within patients will increase from 2012 to 2030. They recommend if you are a heart failure patient to make a doctor's follow-up appointment two weeks after surgery or treatment.
