Palliative Care for People With HF

March 23, 2026 updated by: Lyndsay DeGroot, Indiana University

Implementing Community Palliative Care for People With Heart Failure

Imagine having heart failure, a condition where the heart struggles to pump blood, making daily life hard. People with heart failure often don't feel well and end up going to the hospital a lot. Many of these people could feel better with extra help, but there aren't many programs that offer support beyond usual heart failure treatments. That's where the ADAPT program comes in, which stands for "Advancing Symptom Alleviation with Palliative Treatment." In this program, nurses and social workers call people weekly, helping them manage their toughest symptoms, offering tools to cope with heart failure, and keeping the patients' current doctors involved. We tested this program in a research study with heart failure patients and found that it improved their quality of life and lowered depression, anxiety, and heart failure symptoms. The question now is if the ADAPT program will work in the community, outside of a research setting, so that more people could benefit from it. Specifically, can the ADAPT program work well in new places? Will patients and their families find it helpful? Most importantly, can it help improve the lives of people with heart failure in these new settings? To answer these questions, the study team will work with healthcare providers to 1) ask how to adjust the ADAPT program to work well in various settings (e.g. primary care, heart failure clinic) and 2) use this information to create simple materials and trainings to help them easily provide ADAPT. This will prepare for the next phase of this project to test out the new ADAPT program.

Study Overview

Study Type

Observational

Enrollment (Estimated)

20

Contacts and Locations

This section provides the contact details for those conducting the study, and information on where this study is being conducted.

Study Contact

  • Name: Lyndsay DeGroot, PhD, RN
  • Phone Number: 317-278-7743
  • Email: lydegroo@iu.edu

Study Locations

    • Indiana
      • Indianapolis, Indiana, United States, 47408
        • Recruiting
        • IUHealth
        • Contact:
          • Lyndsay DeGroot, PhD, RN
          • Phone Number: 317-278-7743
          • Email: lydegroo@iu.edu

Participation Criteria

Researchers look for people who fit a certain description, called eligibility criteria. Some examples of these criteria are a person's general health condition or prior treatments.

Eligibility Criteria

Ages Eligible for Study

  • Adult
  • Older Adult

Accepts Healthy Volunteers

No

Sampling Method

Non-Probability Sample

Study Population

Outpatient clinician or staff member with at least 6 months of experience caring for patients with HF

Description

Inclusion Criteria:

  • Outpatient clinician or staff member (e.g. physician, physician assistant, nurse practitioner, registered nurse, social worker, psychologist, medical assistant) or healthcare leadership personnel (e.g. Chief Nursing Officer, Clinic Medical Director etc.)
  • at least 6 months of experience caring for patients with HF
  • 18 years or older

Exclusion Criteria:

-

Study Plan

This section provides details of the study plan, including how the study is designed and what the study is measuring.

How is the study designed?

Design Details

What is the study measuring?

Primary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure
Measure Description
Time Frame
Qualitative Themes
Time Frame: Baseline
Qualitative themes from interviews and clinic observations and descriptive summary statistics (e.g. means, percentages) of barriers and facilitators from pCAT and PCSI surveys.
Baseline

Collaborators and Investigators

This is where you will find people and organizations involved with this study.

Investigators

  • Principal Investigator: Lyndsay DeGroot, PhD, RN, Indiana University School of Medicine

Publications and helpful links

The person responsible for entering information about the study voluntarily provides these publications. These may be about anything related to the study.

General Publications

Study record dates

These dates track the progress of study record and summary results submissions to ClinicalTrials.gov. Study records and reported results are reviewed by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to make sure they meet specific quality control standards before being posted on the public website.

Study Major Dates

Study Start (Actual)

October 20, 2025

Primary Completion (Estimated)

March 1, 2028

Study Completion (Estimated)

September 1, 2028

Study Registration Dates

First Submitted

January 13, 2026

First Submitted That Met QC Criteria

January 13, 2026

First Posted (Actual)

January 21, 2026

Study Record Updates

Last Update Posted (Actual)

March 27, 2026

Last Update Submitted That Met QC Criteria

March 23, 2026

Last Verified

March 1, 2026

More Information

Terms related to this study

Additional Relevant MeSH Terms

Other Study ID Numbers

  • 28648

Plan for Individual participant data (IPD)

Plan to Share Individual Participant Data (IPD)?

UNDECIDED

IPD Plan Description

Qualitative interview data is often identifiable

Drug and device information, study documents

Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated drug product

No

Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated device product

No

This information was retrieved directly from the website clinicaltrials.gov without any changes. If you have any requests to change, remove or update your study details, please contact register@clinicaltrials.gov. As soon as a change is implemented on clinicaltrials.gov, this will be updated automatically on our website as well.

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