Intensive Prevention Program After Decompensated Heart Failure

Introduction: Care for patients with heart failure (HF) often remains inadequate, eventhough a variety of treatment options exist. Guideline‐based, multimodal therapy israrely fully established, partly due to insufficient intersectoral cooperation andinsufficient patient training. Heart failure nurses (HFN) as specialized non‐medicalpersonnel are intended to contribute to better patient care. E‐learning and the use ofmobile devices are modern options for training patients. However, previous studies inthis regard only examined a few aspects of therapy and came to different results. TheIntensive Prevention Program after decompensated Heart Failure (IPP‐HF) will investigateif a one‐year web‐based and HFN‐guided program for patients hospitalized due tocongestive heart failure leads to a lower rate of re‐hospitalization and an improvementin quality of life (QoL).Study design: Patients hospitalized for decompensated HF will be prospectively enrolledand assigned to either a 12 months HFN‐guided intensive prevention program or standardcare. The prevention program will include patient training per e‐learning, use of an appfor HF, linking the patient to an interdisciplinary heart failure network and referral toheart sports groups or other specialists and will include regular monitoring for signs of(threatening) decompensation, medication, fitness and QoL. The combined primary studyendpoint will comprise rehospitalization for decompensated HF and QoL after 1 year.Secondary endpoints will include mortality, completeness of anticongestive medication,changes in ejection fraction, NTproBNP, ferritin, transferrin, 6‐minute walking distance,relative maximum oxygen‐consumption (peak VO2), NYHA‐class, depression status (PHQ‐9) andknowledge about HF (AHFKT).Conclusions :The randomized IPP‐HF study will evaluate the effect of an web‐based andHFN‐guided prevention program on rehospitalization and QoL for patients hospitalized fordecompensated heart failure.