Digital Health in Heart Failure: Optimizing results with fewer resources

by Pedro Vergara, September 4, 2024

Heart Failure, also known as cardiac insufficiency, is considered by many experts to be a true epidemic. On a global level, it affects 64 million people, and according to the Spanish Heart Foundation 770,000 people have been diagnosed in Spain alone. This is a multifactorial disease with a high prevalence of comorbidities, which makes it a condition that is difficult to manage and monitor, with the resultant high use of healthcare resources (it makes up 3.8% of total healthcare costs in Spain). Adherence to treatment, management of symptoms, secondary effects of pharmaceuticals, and patient quality of life are some of the challenges that must be addressed with this disease, all of which affect both patients and the healthcare team.

Because of this, Digital Health platforms play an important role as tools that can help monitor and manage Heart Failure, offering support to patients and reducing the burden to the care system through:

Monitoring symptoms and events remotely

Management of comorbidities

Personalization of care

Creation of personalized plans for implementing therapies and healthy habits

Using Digital Health platforms, the patients can report information about their disease in real time, enabling the care to be adapted to their specific situations without the need for an in-person consultation, thus optimizing the use of resources and providing treatment that is more specific and personalized. In addition, these tools enable providers to create and adapt programs for each patient that include guides and specific recommendations in order to improve adherence to treatment and maintenance of habits for a healthy lifestyle. These are two elements that are very important in Heart Failure, as they are directly related to the development of decompensation.

In addition, another benefit provided by Digital Health in this type of disease is its assistance in early identification of patients at risk, enabling providers to react in a timely way, reducing the probability of hospitalization. This is an important feature, given that hospitalizations in Heart Failure make up 25% of all admissions associated with cardiac diseases in Spain.

Finally, we cannot ignore one of the most important health outcomes—mortality. Recently, there was a publication about promising outcomes from the use of Digital Health in the management of Heart Failure. It was observed that mortality decreased in patients treated with Digital Health platforms in comparison to a control group receiving traditional treatment. It also was shown that depressive symptoms decreased when the patients received this kind of intervention.

In conclusion, Digital Health tools for the management of Heart Failure represent an innovative approach to treatment that provide multiple benefits to patients and the healthcare team. In a global context, with an aging population and an increasing prevalence of this disease, it is ever more important to promote the use of this technology, enabling the optimization of resources and an improvement in patient health outcomes.

#DigitalHealth #DigitalTherapeutics #HeartFailure