Year-long nationwide project to standardise medical treatment for heart failure.
A nationwide project involving nearly 100 hospitals was launched, aiming to standardise medical treatment for heart attacks and provide more uniformity between various doctors, as well as better long-term management of patients.
The project is the latest effort by the China Cardiovascular Association to reduce the rate of rehospitalisation and death among heart attack patients – whose five-year survival rate is worse than cancer, and promote better diagnoses and treatment of heart disease.
The project was launched in Suzhou, Jiangsu province and will last for a year.
Heart failure is the serious, often late-stage, manifestation of cardiovascular disease, and is China’s number one killer. Its incidence has risen year-on-year.
Nearly one percent of Chinese adults have had heart attacks, said Zhou Jingmin, a professor at Zhongshan Hospital affiliated with Fudan University in Shanghai and one of the leading experts at the China Heart Failure Center.
Two main challenges in the clinical treatment of the disease lie in patients’ low compliance with doctors’ orders after discharge from the hospital, which results in a 25 percent rehospitalisation rate within three months, and doctors giving treatment plans based on their own experience rather than a uniform procedure, Zhou said.
Zhou said the project, sponsored by Servier, a French pharmaceutical company, will collect data on 1,200 patients and their corresponding treatment plans from doctors nationwide. Top experts in the field will review them, and the doctors responsible for the good outcomes will tour the country to give speeches about their cases, which will finally be collected as a book to be distributed to doctors.
Also, at least 8,000 patients will be recruited to report their heart rates and medication on a daily basis to the doctor in charge through a smartphone application, so that their health conditions can be continuously updated and seen by the doctors. [APBN]
Source: China Daily