Heart Failure Recorded in Primary Care, Hospital Admissions and National Mortality Registry

Heart failure (HF) is one of the leading causes of hospital admissions and mortality in modern healthcare systems. It can be viewed as a collective clinical syndrome of many signs and symptoms and is frequently the common endpoint of various heart diseases. Often, it is not diagnosed until it has reached a level whereby quality of life is significantly, and often irreversibly, impaired. Even though vast quantities of National Health Service (NHS) data concerning patients with heart failure are recorded, there are limited 'real world' longitudinal insights about the prognosis and consequences of HF. Although linked electronic health records cohorts such as the CALIBER program become increasingly available, for heart failure the overlap, risk factors and subsequent mortality have not been compared. Previous studies on heart failure using EHR sources have used ICD-9 or 10 codes for the identification of heart failure cases and the prevalence estimates of risk factors and comorbidity. Furthermore, the assessment of supporting information for heart failure present in electronic healthcare registries remains largely unknown. Currently, heart failure is typically inferred based on previous reports or the prescription of heart failure related medication. To strengthen heart failure case ascertainment in large electronic healthcare registries, linkages with primary care data such as what is done in CALIBER could allow more detailed insight in medical history, clinical diagnoses, anthropometric measures, health behaviour, laboratory tests, medical procedures and prescriptions.

In this study, the investigators assessed the distribution of recording, supportive medical information for heart failure diagnosis, risk factors and subsequent mortality of heart failure patients captured in linked EHR data from primary care, hospital admissions and/or death registry.

This study is part of the CALIBER (Cardiovascular disease research using linked bespoke studies and electronic records) programme funded over 5 years from the NIHR and Wellcome Trust. CALIBER has received both Ethics approval (ref 09/H0810/16) and ECC approval (ref ECC 2-06(b)/2009 CALIBER dataset).