Heart Failure Management

Advanced Heart Failure Care

The Heart Failure Clinic at Core Physicians is a service for patients with heart failure that is hard to manage. Our goals are to improve your quality of life and help keep you out of the hospital. We work closely with you and your health care team to improve heart failure care.

What Does the Heart Failure Clinic Do?

• Teach and support patients to help them feel more confident in self-managing their heart failure.
• Work with patients to set goals and create heart failure action plans based on their needs/concerns.
• Help patients understand and manage their heart failure medicines.
• Schedule same-day appointments for patients that need them.
• Give the best care possible to patients with advanced heart failure, including palliative care.

Each patient meets with a physician assistant who works with a cardiologist and a nurse care coordinator. As a team, they work with patients to create a heart failure action plan based on each patient’s needs and goals.

Patients have regular office visits and phone calls with the physician assistant or the care coordinator to report symptoms and talk about ways to solve problems.

Is the Heart Failure Clinic Right for Me?

If you have had one or more of the following problems, the Heart Failure Clinic might be right for you.

• You have been to the hospital two or more times in one year due to your heart failure.
• You have challenges in your life that make it hard to manage your heart failure.
• You are on a high dose of a diuretic (“water pill”) and still have symptoms.
• You have AFIB that is difficult to control.

If you are interested in becoming a patient with the clinic, your first step would be an office visit with a cardiologist. The next step is a follow-up office visit with our physician assistant. This visit is an hour and provides detailed education and health advice tailored to your needs.

Palliative Care

Palliative care is specialized medical care for people with a serious illness which focuses on providing relief from symptoms and stress. The goal is to improve quality of life for both the patient and the family.

Care is provided by a team of specialists who work together with a patient’s other doctors to provide an extra layer of support. It is appropriate at any age and at any stage in a serious illness. Most insurance plans, including Medicare and Medicaid, cover palliative care services.

Heart Failure Clinic Overview

Peter Shactman, PA-C, from Core Cardiology describes how our Heart Failure Clinic can help patients with heart failure that is hard to manage.