Description

Keeping heart failure (HF) patients at home with a low symptom burden after hospital discharge is challenging. Evidence shows that delay in HF symptom recognition and poor self-management are associated with unplanned emergency department visits and rehospitalizations. Clinical trials aimed at preventing rehospitalization using telemonitoring have shown limited utility suggesting that monitoring physical changes alone may not be sufficient to maintain stability of HF patients at home. A recent cancer study has demonstrated that patients receiving cancer chemotherapy achieved a 40% reduction in symptoms using Symptom Care at Home (SCH), a computer-interface telephonic interactive voice response system pairing patient-reported symptoms with automated real-time, self-management coaching. While a few HF studies have used interventions that monitored symptoms, no studies have tested a system that monitors and provides real-time, self-management coaching tailored to specific patient-reported outcomes(PRO). The objective of this study is to pilot an adaption of the SCH system to HF resulting in preliminary data to support a fully-powered randomized control trial to test an adapted SCH-HF system that could be widely disseminated. Specific Aims over two-parts are: Aim 1] Tailor the real-time self-management coaching system to integrate HF symptom monitoring and self-management coaching into the SCH-HF system; and Aim 2] Conduct a pilot randomized controlled trial (RCT) to assess the feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary efficacy of the SCH-HF system. This study is significant because it expands our understanding into HF symptom monitoring and management using PRO in the home setting. The proposal is innovative because it integrates HF clinician and patient perspectives to develop a daily home monitoring and real-time self-management coaching system.