On February 9, 2018 at 10:00 am EST, join CardioCareLive for a roundtable discussion on the new guidelines for the treatment of heart failure. In this second part of our series on Implementing Guideline-Directed Medical Therapy for Patients with Heart Failure, the panelists will discuss multidisciplinary approaches to implementing the guidelines – specifically, the challenges clinicians face in implementing the new heart failure recommendations and strategies for incorporating them into your real-life practice.
Dr. Akshay S. Desai, MD, MPH of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, will lead the panel discussion. Speaking to the CardioCareLive team, Dr. Desai shared why an online CME program that addresses the quality gap is so important to clinicians and patients alike:
“A wealth of evidence from clinical trials and large national registries indicates that provision of care in accordance with the guidelines is associated with improved clinical outcomes, functional capacity, return to work, and quality of life. Despite this evidence, however, application of guideline directives to the care of patients in clinical practice falls short of the ideal. While there may be a number of reasons for this quality gap, one key issue may be awareness among clinicians of the critical importance of optimizing medical therapy even in apparently stable patients with heart failure and reduced ejection fraction. The arrival of new pharmacologic therapies that offer incremental benefits with regard to morbidity and mortality for heart failure patients creates an additional educational gap, since many clinicians are unfamiliar with the appropriate application of new drugs in clinical practice.” He continued,
“As the field expands, and the array of effective therapies grows, so too does the need for continuing education of clinicians about how to effectively deploy treatment to benefit their patients.”
Dr. Desai will be joined by James L. Januzzi, Jr., MD, FACC, FESC of Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School and Biam Institute for Clinical Research, John D. Goodson, MD of Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, and Orly Vardeny, PharmD, MS of the University of Minnesota Medical School.
Register for the upcoming roundtable on heart failure at CardioCareLive. For more information about this, and other educational programs for cardiologists and healthcare professionals treating patients with cardiac issues, contact Lauren Alford at lalford@platformq.com.
Part one of this program is now available on demand.