Many of the 6 million people living with heart failure and their families would benefit from receiving palliative care services but those services are not currently integrated into heart failure medical care. Palliative care helps keep people more comfortable and at home, as opposed to the ER or hospital, and provides support there to them and so could help improve their quality of life.
Palliative Care Pilot is a collaboration between the American Heart Association and The Coalition to Transform Advanced Care (C-TAC) to improve access to and enhance palliative care services for people with heart failure and their caregivers.
Palliative Care Pilot seeks to align clinical and administrative standards and to expand the evidence on delivering interdisciplinary palliative care services to heart failure patients. Such alignment has previously shown success through multipayer efforts (e.g., the California Advanced Illness Collaborative).
While there have been more general approaches on increasing access to palliative care services for all with serious illness through value-based arrangements, we are unaware of any approach that has examined services for this population. Yet there is strong evidence of the importance of palliative care to people with heart failure, namely the Association’s policy statement Palliative Care and Cardiovascular Disease and Stroke (which focuses on heart failure, given the high prevalence of heart failure and the associated morbidity and mortality) and the 2022 AHA/ACC/HFSA Guideline for the Management of Heart Failure: A Report of the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association Joint Committee on Clinical Practice Guidelines (which promotes the appropriate use of palliative care in people with heart failure).
Thus, this pilot project builds on previous efforts but will focus specifically on developing standards and guidance for people with heart failure and for the payers and health care systems supporting their needs. Lessons from this pilot are expected to show how people with heart failure, as well as payers and health care systems, can benefit from the timely provision of palliative care services.
