Predicting HF Worsening: Speech Analysis Beats Weighing Scales

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Ileana L. Piña, MD, MPH: Hello. I'm Ileana Piña. I'm the quality chief at Thomas Jefferson University, which is right down the street. We are in Philadelphia.

I'm lucky enough to have here my good friend, Dr William Abraham, who's a distinguished professor at The Ohio State — we know better not to say "Ohio State" — in cardiology and has been a part of many different trials. He's truly a clinical trialist.

Let me turn the page to heart failure and this definition of worsening heart failure. I always thought it was just a patient who was getting worse. If that patient gets admitted to the hospital, it truly changes their trajectory. The event rates are huge when the patients come in to the hospital and then go home. The main reason people get admitted, other than that they don't feel well, is because they're congested.

We have this term, "congestion." What does it really mean? Can we detect it ahead of time? We've been putting in monitors in the pulmonary artery systemto see if we can pick up the congestion before the patient gets really sick and we end up not in the emergency department (ED) but actually inside the hospital.