Hospital facilities at home for heart failure patients

Background: Heart failure is a complex syndrome and also one of the common reasons for readmission following discharge. This condition imposes an enormous economic burden on healthcare sectors. The present research aimed to study the establishment of a home care system for patients with heart failure in order to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of this system and patient satisfaction. Methods: The present health system research selected 40 patients as the sample with eligible criteria. Care was provided by nurses based on physicians� instructions. In the first visit at home, a questionnaire on the quality of life was filled out by the patients or the nurses. The financial data of the medical records of the patients constituted the reference for the analysis of cost. After the intervention, the questionnaire on the quality of life was filled out by the patients once again and their satisfaction was measured. The data were statistically analyzed using the Python programming language and SPSS-16 at the 0.05 level of significance. Results: The length of stay in the hospital for each patient decreased from 2.1 days to 0.9 days per month. The number of annual hospitalizations also decreased from 5 to 3, and the number of annual outpatient visits showed a reduction from 46 to 38 for each patient. The results of the patient satisfaction assessment also indicated that most of the patients were satisfied with the services provided to them. Conclusions: The results showed that our study was cost-effective. We suggest that interventions be performed on larger scales so that the results can be used in the future as services available to patients with heart failure. © 2020, Iranian Heart Association. All rights reserved