Heart failure tools

Our heart failure team was part of the Accelerating Best Care in Pennsylvania program through a grant by our State Representative, Todd Eachus. Our team met weekly and identified high leverage points that needed to be addressed-one being that of discharge instructions. We also identified the need for standing order sets for heart failure admissions. We implemented standing order sets in July of 2005, making them mandatory for use in 2006. We also placed a "yellow" heart failure form on the front of all heart failure patients to alert nursing staff to the fact that this was a heart failure admission. We also asked the pharmacy to printout patient profiles to compare meds at discharge for these patients, and a memo was sent to our medical staff reminding them of their responsibility of filling out disease-specific "Heart Failure Discharge Instructions" and writing out the meds. The disease-specific heart failure discharge instruction form was a newly developed form strictly for use with heart failure patients.