Journal of Urgent Care Medicine

Heart Failure Definition Gets A Makeover

A new international expert consensus document from leading cardiology groups offers an update on the definition of heart failure, taking into consideration advances in diagnosis and clinical understanding of the disease, as published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. While the statement isn’t a clinical practice guideline—and does not include treatment recommendations—it aims to clarify the definition and adopt it universally. For urgent care clinicians, the most relevant point is that heart …

Cardiovascular Complications Follow RSV Infection

A Danish study published in JAMA Network Open found that respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) infection was linked to a sustained rise in cardiovascular risk over 1 year in adults aged 45 years or older. In the study population, those with RSV (8,747 individuals) experienced 665 cardiovascular events vs 257 in matched controls (8,747 individuals without infection), yielding a 365-day excess risk of 4.69 percentage points. In this matched cohort study of 17,494 adults, early risk …

Are Quality Assessments Worth the Cost?

Tracking and reporting quality measures cost four specialties—including primary care, cardiology, orthopedics, and “multispecialty”—$15.4 billion annually, according to a new study published in Health Affairs. One concern voiced by the authors is that standardization of quality measures is sorely lacking so, in effect, such measures may have little meaning to begin with. The data are based on surveys of 250 practices from each of the selected specialties. On average, physicians spend 2.6 hours per week …

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