Dr Amar Bhakta on Changing the Approach to Treating Heart Failure

Reimbursement structures and population demographics change the way hospitals approach heart failure, explained Amar Bhakta, MD, of Rush University Medical Center.

Transcript

How are changing reimbursement structures driving changes in the way hospitals approach heart failure?

This reimbursement picture, I mean, it’s definitely driving predominantly everything, I think. It’s definitely getting most hospitals, it should be all hospitals in a different way of thinking not just from the reimbursement perspective but also from the patient centered perspective. Definitely patients don’t want to be readmitted if they’re experiencing symptoms or worsening of symptoms and with that hospitals are just not getting reimbursed so whatever can be done in an appropriately and a good way should be done.

What have you learned about treating different populations with heart failure?

The way we have to approach this is that Chicago is a large urban population with a wide variety of patients in terms of both their educations and overall demographics. So with that you have to be mindful that each approach should be patient centered. Everyone has different understandings of what heart failure is and with that you have to start with a general approach and dig a little deeper into find out what heart failure is specifically for them and then how it can be managed and what we’ve noticed is that getting patients to see their PCPs regularly can be an issue especially in a large urban population in Chicago.