Improving heart failure care in outpatient practices

This column is the eighth in a series reporting on the efforts of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services ([CMS], formerly known as the Health Care Financing Administration), to improve care for Medicare beneficiaries with heart failure. Previous columns have focused on the hospital-based National Heart Failure project. An outpatient practice-based project, the Heart Failure Practice Improvement Effort (HF PIE), was described in the fourth and sixth columns. This column reports experience from the HF PIE project at the practice level in three states.