A Blueprint for the Post Discharge Clinic Visit after an Admission for Heart Failure

The immense symptom burden and healthcare expenditure associated with heart failure (HF) has resulted in hospital systems, insurance companies, and federal agencies playing close attention to systems of care delivery. In particular, there has been a large extent of focus on decreasing the frequency of HF readmissions through the development of hospital quality measures and the expansion of post discharge services to improve transitions of care from the inpatient to the outpatient setting. The post discharge clinic visit (PDV) serves an important role in this process as it acts as a fulcrum for the multi-disciplinary services available to HF patients, as well as an opportunity to fill any gaps that might have occurred in evidence based care of the patient. The objective of this review is to provide a blueprint for the PDV that will allow clinicians to construct the key elements of the PDV in a patient-centered fashion that is firmly rooted in the guidelines.