Access to Heart Failure Care – Strategies

This session examines structural and operational strategies to improve access to advanced heart failure care in the United States. The session starts with an overview of current barriers to care in advanced heart failure, including complex referral pathways, geographic and socioeconomic constraints, and a limited advanced heart failure workforce.

The session will then focus on outpatient management models, with particular emphasis on the role of advanced practice providers (APPs) in leading community-based advanced heart failure clinics. Faculty will review the rationale for APP-led care, core components of effective outpatient clinics such as patient selection criteria, staffing models, and workflow design, and practical approaches to early identification, risk stratification, and longitudinal management. Strategies for integrating palliative care and conducting goals-of-care discussions in the outpatient setting will also be addressed, given their relevance to advanced heart failure.

Finally, the session will explore hub-and-spoke care models as a framework for coordinated, network-based delivery. Discussion will highlight how centralized expertise, combined with structured outreach, can reduce fragmentation, expand specialty access, and improve continuity of care for patients across diverse practice environments.

Learning Objectives

• Define key factors influencing access to heart failure care.
• Understand common challenges to accessing heart failure care.
• Describe the role of advanced practice providers and their benefits in outpatient heart failure care.
• Understand the “hub-and-spoke” model of care as an organizational structure supporting high-quality heart failure care.