Why Heart Failure Patients Need to Know About CardioMEMS

You're sitting on the couch with swollen feet. You've been coughing more lately, and you seem more tired this week. Your appointment with your heart failure (HF) specialist is still three weeks away; but something just doesn't feel right. You head to the bedroom to lie down and put your head on the pillow, but the pillow isn't just an everyday pillow you get from the store. This pillow came from your cardiologist. You feel grateful that your doctor is looking out for you even while you are at home and he's at the hospital. The last thing you want to do is spend time in the hospital again. Enter the CardioMEMS heart failure monitoring system, which has been proven to reduce hospitalizations, improve quality of life and lower costs associated with HF. Your doctor recently implanted a miniaturized, wireless monitoring sensor to look for changes in your heart failure symptoms. As you lie on the pillow, important information is being uploaded so your HF team can remotely monitor the blood pressure in your heart and lung system (pulmonary artery pressure). Changes can be an early indicator of the worsening of heart failure. If something seems to have changed, your doctor will adjust your treatment plan or medications before the symptoms become a problem. That's comforting because your grandson's birthday is this weekend and you don't want to miss that.