Godfrey, Sarah

Background: Older adults with advanced heart failure experience significant morbidity and mortality and face higher complication rates from advanced therapies. Ensuring these therapies match patients’ values is essential for patient-centered care, and palliative care can be instrumental in clarifying patients’ goals. Aim: To examine the relationship between advanced heart failure patients’ expressed goals of care and their subsequent clinical outcomes and circumstances of death. Design: In this retrospective cohort study, electronic medical records were reviewed for demographic information, advanced therapy evaluation outcomes, and quality-of-death metrics. Goals of care were identified from palliative consult notes and compared with outcomes to assess goal-concordance. Setting/Participants: This single-center study included adults who were referred to both advanced heart failure and palliative care specialists from 2012 to 2022. Results: Of 212 patients, 91 (42.9%) underwent evaluation for advanced therapies, though few received a heart transplant (16, 7.5%) or left ventricular assist device (32, 15.1%). Most (148, 69.8%) had only one palliative physician visit. One hundred thirty-nine (65.6%) died, often in the hospital (55, 40%) and with life-sustaining therapy in the last 24 h (73, 52.5%). Most (167, 78.8%) received goal-concordant care, with the main reasons for discordance being the desire for advanced therapy (33, 15.6%) and complications post-implantation affecting quality of life (9, 4.2%). Conclusions: Few older adults received advanced therapies, and palliative care was underutilized, with many patients seeing palliative care only once. Most received goal-concordant care, but decisions were often made late, highlighting the need for earlier, longitudinal palliative care for these vulnerable patients.