Heart Failure
The Region's On-Demand Heart Failure Care Center
We know your heart.
Heart failure is a clinical syndrome that occurs when your heart is not meeting your body’s demand for oxygen and nutrients due to abnormalities in your heart’s structure or function. At the MetroHealth Heart Failure Care Center, our team of providers will evaluate your heart failure and guide you through cutting-edge therapies to limit—or even eliminate—the impact of heart failure on your life.
The MetroHealth Heart Failure Care Center
Once you’re a patient at the MetroHealth Heart Failure Care Center, you’ll receive on-demand care when you need it—including our 24/7 hotline, where you can speak to a provider about immediate concerns. Frequent appointments and nurse calls allow us to actively manage your heart failure, regularly review your status, and adjust your medication and treatment as needed.
Seeking care at the MetroHealth Heart Failure Care Center means access to a team of cardiologists who are subspecialized and board-certified in the management of heart failure. Working alongside a team of advanced-practice nurses, heart failure-trained nurses and a clinical pharmacist, we help people with heart failure live healthier lives.
Heart failure is a chronic disease that is managed rather than cured.
Heart failure occurs when your heart can’t pump blood like it should, preventing your body from receiving enough oxygen and nutrients for healthy living. Treatment and management of heart failure can help you avoid symptoms and still maintain an active life.
The main way heart failure appears is through congestion. Congestion occurs when blood backs up from your heart, because it’s not being pumped out of your heart efficiently. The blood, in turn, enters your lungs and can also collect in your legs. Think of congestion as a sump pump that can’t keep up with the water. Other signs of heart failure include fatigue and difficulty performing physical tasks.
Preventing heart failure means preventing the conditions that cause your heart to weaken or stiffen.
Causes of heart failure include:
- Heart attacks
- Coronary artery disease
- Diabetes
- High blood pressure
- Arrythmia
- Kidney disease
- Obesity
- Tobacco use
- Alcohol use
Often, patients who have undergone chemotherapy are at risk for heart failure as well.
You can prevent heart failure by:
- Avoiding tobacco and alcohol
- Staying active
- Avoiding foods high in sodium and fat
What can heart failure feel like?
Symptoms include:
- Shortness of breath
- Chest pain
- Palpitations
- Fatigue
- Swelling, especially in your ankles, legs and belly
- Weight gain
- Dry cough
- Dizziness
- Low appetite
- Waking at night
During your first visit to the MetroHealth Heart Failure Care Center, you’ll meet your heart failure care team. In this visit, you’ll:
- Discuss your symptoms
- Learn about heart failure
- Develop a personalized plan with your care team to manage your symptoms and improve your quality of life
Your personalized plan may include:
- Starting medication
- Changing your diet and exercise
- Learning how to monitor your symptoms and seek help, if needed
- Performing further testing
- Starting cardiac rehabilitation
- Seeing other sub-specialty providers
- Follow-up visits with your heart failure care team
Once we are able to assess your symptoms and the result of any diagnostic testing, our team of providers can help develop a personalized treatment plan to manage your heart failure.
Multidisciplinary Care
The Heart Failure Care Center provides multidisciplinary care for you:
- Heart failure-certified cardiologists
- Nurse practitioners and heart failure-trained nurses
- Dedicated pharmacist
- Social worker
- Care coordinator
We work as a team to educate you on when to seek additional care and how to have the best life possible with heart failure.
We’ll get to know you well, and we’re always available through our patient hotline, MyChart messaging, and visits either virtually or in our clinic.
Medication
Heart failure is most often treated with medication. The three types of medication therapy we offer include:
Diuretics
Heart failure with congestion causes your body to retain salt and water. In turn, that causes your lungs to be congested and your legs swollen. Diuretics help force your kidneys to get rid of the salt and water in your system.
Protective
With heart failure, your body may try to work too hard to make up for poor heart function. Protective medication keeps your heart working efficiently so it can heal. Protective medicine is individualized to each patient and we’ll monitor your body’s response to this medication over multiple visits.
Cause-Targeting
Heart failure has many causes, including inflammation, abnormal proteins in your heart and too much iron. We’ll detect the cause of your heart failure and use medication to target those causes.
Devices
CardioMEMS
A CardioMEMS system—a cutting-edge technology available at MetroHealth—allows us to monitor patients with heart failure through a sensor in the pulmonary artery. This sensor—about the size of a paper clip—helps us notice small pressure changes that can mean worsening heart failure and the need for a change in treatment. The sensor sends the information directly to your provider, so you can be monitored at home rather than in a hospital.
Implantable Cardioverter-Defibrillator (ICD)
ICDs monitor your heart rhythm for any life-threatening abnormal rhythms. Used for patients who are at risk of sudden cardiac death, when an ICD senses an abnormal heart rhythm, it delivers an electric pulse that restores a normal heartbeat. Implanted just under your skin, it can also be programmed to function as a pacemaker to regulate your heart rhythm continuously.
Advanced Heart Failure Therapies
If medication and devices haven’t prevented your heart failure from progressing, you may be a candidate for advanced therapies such as a heart pump or transplant. MetroHealth works collaboratively with two transplant centers in Greater Cleveland to make sure you have access to treatment for end-stage heart failure.
Advancing Research
MetroHealth participates in many clinical research studies to understand heart disease and disease management, sharing those results with the international medical community.
A team dedicated to you.
The MetroHealth Heart and Vascular Center is setting a new standard of care in northeast Ohio.
