Remote heart function monitoring: role of the CardioMEMS HF System

Heart failure is a pandemic condition that is challenging cardiology today. The primary economical and social burden of this syndrome is hospitalization rate whose costs represent the highest ones within the entire healthcare management. Remote monitoring of physiological data, obtained through self-reporting via telephone calls or, automatically, using external devices is a potential novel approach to implement management of patients with heart failure and reduce hospitalization rates. Relatively large but, sometimes, contradicting information exists about the efficacy of remote monitoring via different noninvasive approaches to reduce the economical and social burden of heart failure management. This leaves still partly unaddressed this critical issue and generates the need for new approaches. In this context, the CardioMEMS device that can chronically monitor pulmonary pressures from a small microchip inserted transvenously in the pulmonary artery seems to represent an innovative tool to challenge hospitalization rates. Consecutive analyses from the CHAMPION study had indeed documented the efficacy of the CardioMEMS in the remote monitoring of the pulmonary circulation status of patients with heart failure and in providing adequate information to optimally manage such patients with the final result of a significant hospitalization rate reduction. The striking information here is that this appears to be true in patients with preserved left ventricular ejection fraction also. Overall, the reports from the CHAMPION study encourage the use of CardioMEMS but larger populations are needed to definitively prove its value.