Hospitals with higher guideline-directed medical therapy scores showed lower rates of mortality, rehospitalization and costs in heart failure patients, according to a Sept. 25 study released by JAMA Cardiology.
Researchers from the University of Colorado in Aurora, Durham, N.C.-based Duke Clinical Research Institute, Dallas-based University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, University of California in Los Angeles and Palo Alto, Calif.-based Stanford University designed a GDMT score, on a scale of 0 to 1, based on a hospital's adherence to "prescribing evidence-based heart failure treatments at discharge," the study said.
The American Heart Association's Get With the Guidelines heart failure registry of 41,161 heart-failure patients across 360 hospitals from January 2015 to September 2019, was analyzed for the study.
Hospitals with higher GDMT scores had lower hospital mortality, lower mortality or HF rehospitalization, more home time and lower costs.
"Improving hospital GDMT score[s] may help improve outcomes and reduce health care costs," authors of the study wrote.