Protocol for Telehealth Evaluation and Follow-up of Patients With Chronic Heart Failure During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Because of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, we were forced to cancel scheduled visits for nearly 150 patients followed in our heart failure (HF) outpatient clinic. Therefore, we structured a telephone follow-up, developing a standardized 23-item questionnaire from which we obtained the Covid-19-HF score. The questionnaire was built to reproduce our usual clinical evaluation investigating a patient's social and functional condition, mood, adherence to pharmacological and nonpharmacological recommendations, clinical and hemodynamic status, pharmacological treatment, and need to contact emergency services. The score was used as a clinical tool to define patients' clinical stability and timing of the following telephone contact on the basis of the assignment to progressively increasing risk score groups: green (0–3), yellow (4–8), and red (≥9).

Here we present our experience applying the score in the first 30 patients who completed the 4-week follow-up, describing baseline clinical characteristics and events that occurred in the period of observation.