Defining Opportunities For Achieving Health Equity In Heart Failure Prevention And Treatment: The Role Of The Heart Failure Society Of America

Abstract

Although care of patients with heart failure (HF) has improved in the past decade, important disparities in HF outcomes persist based on race/ethnicity and gender. Age-adjusted HF-related HF hospitalization rates are highest for Black patients, particularly among young Black men and women compared to their White counterparts. The consequence of longstanding residential segregation is that Black and Latinx patients are more likely to reside in neighborhoods with limited opportunities for therapeutic lifestyle interventions to prevent the onset of HF. Growing income inequality in the United States also puts Black and Latinx patients, and women at higher risk of having limited access to healthcare and novel therapeutics. Limited conclusions can be made about populations including "Asians", because of an overall lack of data, and inappropriate grouping of a people with a heterogeneous risk of CVD (i.e. East Asians vs. South Asians). Moreover, recent data confirm that bias reduction training and diversification of the cardiovascular workforce will improve the quality of care for an increasingly diverse patient population. We propose a session to defining the most pressing needs to achieve health equity in HF prevention and treatment, and to delineate the role the HFSA has in promoting diversity within the society and the cardiovascular workforce at large. Learning Objective(s):• To redefine concepts related to definitions of race and ethnicity in research and clinical care.• To describe the importance of social determinants of health as a root cause for the growing burden of Stage A-B HF, and difficulty in treating Stage C-D HF• To define the role of HFSA in achieving health equity for patients with or at risk for HF