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The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a major unanticipated stress on the workforce, organizational structure, systems of care, and critical resource supplies. To ensure provider safety, to maximize efficiency, and to optimize patient outcomes, health systems need to be agile. Critical care cardiologists may be uniquely positioned to treat the numerous respiratory and cardiovascular complications of the SARS-CoV-2 and support clinicians without critical care training who may be suddenly asked to care for critically ill patients. This review draws upon the experiences of colleagues from heavily impacted regions of the United States and Europe, as well as lessons learned from military mass casualty medicine. This review offers pragmatic suggestions on how to implement scalable models for critical care delivery, cultivate educational tools for team training, and embrace technologies (e.g., telemedicine) to enable effective collaboration despite social distancing imperatives.

Background: Little is known about clinical characteristics, hospital course, and longitudinal outcomes of patients with cardiogenic shock (CS) related to heart failure (HF-CS) compared to acute myocardial infarction (AMI; CS related to AMI [AMI-CS]). Methods: We examined in-hospital and 1-year outcomes of 520 (219 AMI-CS, 301 HF-CS) consecutive patients with CS (January 3, 2017–December 31, 2019) in a single-center registry. Results: Mean age was 61.5±13.5 years, 71% were male, 22% were Black patients, and 63% had chronic kidney disease. The HF-CS cohort was younger (58.5 versus 65.6 years, P <0.001), had fewer cardiac arrests (15.9% versus 35.2%, P <0.001), less vasopressor utilization (61.8% versus 82.2%, P <0.001), higher pulmonary artery pulsatility index (2.14 versus 1.51, P <0.01), lower cardiac power output (0.64 versus 0.77 W, P <0.01) and higher pulmonary capillary wedge pressure (25.4 versus 22.2 mm Hg, P <0.001) than patients with AMI-CS. Patients with HF-CS received less temporary mechanical circulatory support (34.9% versus 76.3% P <0.001) and experienced lower rates of major bleeding (17.3% versus 26.0%, P= 0.02) and in-hospital mortality (23.9% versus 39.3%, P <0.001). Postdischarge, 133 AMI-CS and 229 patients with HF-CS experienced similar rates of 30-day readmission (19.5% versus 24.5%, P =0.30) and major adverse cardiac and cerebrovascular events (23.3% versus 28.8%, P =0.45). Patients with HF-CS had lower 1-year mortality (n=123, 42.6%) compared to the patients with AMI-CS (n=110, 52.9%, P =0.03). Cumulative 1-year mortality was also lower in patients with HF-CS (log-rank test, P =0.04). Conclusions: Patients with HF-CS were younger, and despite lower cardiac power output and higher pulmonary capillary wedge pressure, less likely to receive vasopressors or temporary mechanical circulatory support. Although patients with HF-CS had lower in-hospital and 1-year mortality, both cohorts experienced similarly high rates of postdischarge major adverse cardiovascular and cerebrovascular events and 30-day readmission, highlighting that both cohorts warrant careful long-term follow-up. Registration: URL: https://www.clinicaltrials.gov ; Unique identifier: NCT03378739.

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BackgroundThe inability of patients to accurately and completely recount their clinical status between clinic visits reduces the clinician’s ability to properly manage their patients. One way to improve this situation is to collect objective patient information while the patients are at home and display the collected multi-day clinical information in parallel on a single screen, highlighting threshold violations for each channel, and allowing the viewer to drill down to any analog signal on the same screen, while maintaining the overall physiological context of the patient. All this would be accomplished in a way that was easy for the clinician to view and use.MethodsPatients used five mobile devices to collect six heart failure-related clinical variables: body weight, systolic and diastolic blood pressure, pulse rate, blood oxygen saturation, physical activity, and subjective input. Fourteen clinicians practicing in a heart failure clinic rated the display using the System Usability Scale that, for acceptability, had an expected mean of 68 (SD, 12.5). In addition, we calculated the Intraclass Correlation Coefficient of the clinician responses using a two-way, mixed effects model, ICC (3,1).ResultsWe developed a single-screen temporal hierarchical display (VISION) that summarizes the patient’s home monitoring activities between clinic visits. The overall System Usability Scale score was 92 (95% CI, 87-97), p < 0.0001; the ICC was 0.89 (CI, 0.79-0.97), p < 0.0001.ConclusionClinicians consistently found VISION to be highly usable. To our knowledge, this is the first single-screen, parallel variable, temporal hierarchical display of both continuous and discrete information acquired by patients at home between clinic visits that presents clinically significant information at the point of care in a manner that is usable by clinicians.