Missed opportunities in medical therapy for patients with heart failure in an electronically-identified cohort

BACKGROUND: National registries reveal significant gaps in medical therapy for patients with heart failure and reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF), but may not accurately (or fully) characterize the population eligible for therapy. OBJECTIVE: We developed an automated, electronic health record-based algorithm to identify HFrEF patients eligible for evidence-based therapy, and extracted treatment data to assess gaps in therapy in a large, diverse health system. METHODS: In this cross-sectional study of all NYU Langone Health outpatients with EF ≤ 40% on echocardiogram and an outpatient visit from 3/1/2019 to 2/29/2020, we assessed prescription of the following therapies: beta-blocker (BB), angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitor (ACE-I)/angiotensin receptor blocker (ARB)/angiotensin receptor neprilysin inhibitor (ARNI), and mineralocorticoid receptor antagonist (MRA). Our algorithm accounted for contraindications such as medication allergy, bradycardia, hypotension, renal dysfunction, and hyperkalemia. RESULTS: We electronically identified 2732 patients meeting inclusion criteria. Among those eligible for each medication class, 84.8% and 79.7% were appropriately prescribed BB and ACE-I/ARB/ARNI, respectively, while only 23.9% and 22.7% were appropriately prescribed MRA and ARNI, respectively. In adjusted models, younger age, cardiology visit and lower EF were associated with increased prescribing of medications. Private insurance and Medicaid were associated with increased prescribing of ARNI (OR = 1.40, 95% CI = 1.02–2.00; and OR = 1.70, 95% CI = 1.07–2.67). CONCLUSIONS: We observed substantial shortfalls in prescribing of MRA and ARNI therapy to ambulatory HFrEF patients. Subspecialty care setting, and Medicaid insurance were associated with higher rates of ARNI prescribing. Further studies are warranted to prospectively evaluate provider- and policy-level interventions to improve prescribing of these evidence-based therapies. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12872-022-02734-2.