ICHealth: large-scale digital health data on evidence-based cardiovascular medications, hospitalizations and epidemiological characteristics of heart failure patients in Brazil

Abstract

Abstract Introduction Heart failure (HF) is one of the main causes of morbimortality in Brazil. However, little is known about the characteristics of the Brazilian HF population assisted at the community level, including the use of HF medications and frequency of hospitalizations. ePHealth is an app-based large-scale digital data collection platform that currently has health data on more than 1.5 million people. Purpose To assess the use of evidence-based HF medications, hospitalizations and epidemiological characteristics of HF patients in Brazil. Methods This is an observational retrospective study of the digital health data collected using the ePHealth platform on individuals, who self-reported a diagnosis of HF. Data collected included sociodemographics, clinical data, risk factors, comorbidities, medications and hospitalizations. Results Data collected at more than 40,000 home visits on 5907 individuals with HF were analysed. Majority of them were female, aged 55 to 75 years and brown (Figure 1). About 36% were married, 20% were illiterate, 65% were retired and 66% earned ≤2 minimum wages. Mean BMI was 26.7 kg/m2 (SD 5.9), risk factors and comorbidities were frequent (Figure 1). The use of HF medications was very low (Table 1). There were 575 hospitalizations (9.7%), due to the main following reasons: probable or definite heart failure decompensation (89, 15.5%), heart attack (60, 10.4%), cardiovascular procedures (54, 9.4%) and stroke (42, 7.3%). Conclusion This data suggests that community-level use of evidence-based cardiovascular medications in a population of individuals with HF in Brazil is very low and that hospitalizations are frequent. This study also provides a better understanding of the characteristics of a population of HF individuals, using large-scale real-world data collected on a community-level via an entirely digital platform. ePHealth is a disruptive platform able to provide data on the burden of HF and other cardiovascular diseases, informing decisions on implementation of prevention and management programmes. Figure 1. HF population characteristics Funding Acknowledgement Type of funding source: Private company. Main funding source(s): ePHealth