Guideline‐directed medical therapy for heart failure does not exist: a non‐judgmental framework for describing the level of adherence to evidence‐based drug treatments for patients with a reduced ejection fraction

Numerous guideline documents have issued recommendations to clinicians concerning the treatment of chronic heart failure and a reduced ejection fraction. However, guidelines do not describe what constitutes an acceptable standard of care, and thus, practitioners who adhere to only a small fraction of the recommendations might claim that they are treating patients ‘in accordance with the guidelines’. As a result, <1% of patients with heart failure are receiving all life‐prolonging treatments at trial‐proven doses. A major impediment to the widespread adoption of trial‐based treatments is a lack of any existing framework that would allow physicians to describe the adequacy of care. To address this deficiency, we propose a novel simple approach that would ask practitioners if a patient had been treated using the dosing algorithm that had been shown to be effective for each drug class. The proposed framework recognizes that all landmark survival trials in heart failure were ‘strategy trials’, i.e. the studies mandated a standardized forced‐titration treatment plan that required timely uptitration to specified target dose unless patients experienced clinically meaningful, intolerable or serious adverse events, which persisted or recurred despite adjustment of other medications. Adherence to trial‐proven regimens might be improved if physicians were asked to describe the degree to which a patient's treatment adhered to or deviated from the strategies that had been used to demonstrate the survival benefits of neurohormonal antagonists. The proposed framework should also promote practitioner self‐awareness about the lack of evidence supporting the current widespread use of subtarget doses that are non‐adherent with trial‐proven forced‐titration strategies.