Environmental Scanning

Overview

When getting started, it is helpful first to have a better awareness of heart failure (HF) related programs and initiatives that already exist or are under way in your area. This is to avoid duplication of effort, find opportunities for alignment with the work of others, and to identify local HF champions to work with. Without a coordinated approach and concerted effort towards scanning the local environment, it is difficult to know ‘what is out there’, and critical opportunities may be missed.

This tool is mainly a checklist to help get you started when exploring the presence and/or interest of resources and stakeholders that can be leveraged to support patients with HF and their (family) caregivers along the continuum of care.

This checklist is not exhaustive. To help us further refine this list, we welcome you to share some of the key HF resources or stakeholders that you discovered in your region that are not included here with CorHealth Ontario (oh-corh_service@ontariohealth.ca).

Integrating Heart Failure Care – Environmental Scan

Consider searching for and connecting with the following resources and stakeholders who you may wish to consider including as you work towards integrating heart failure care (IHFC) in your region:

Programs

  • ☐ Cardiac rehabilitation
  • ☐ Diabetes education
  • ☐ Geriatrics
  • ☐ Palliative care
  • ☐ Health links

Services providing care in the home

  • ☐ Rapid response nursing
  • ☐ Community paramedicine (including telemonitoring program)
  • ☐ Palliative care
  • ☐ Home-based programs to support elderly population (e.g. DIVERT)
  • ☐ Hospital/community-based transitional care programs (e.g. integrated comprehensive care program)
  • ☐ Hospital-based telemonitoring

Disease Management Programs

  • ☐ Disease management programs- e.g. heart function clinic, COPD clinic, geriatrics, mental health
  • ☐ Rapid assessment clinics

Health care facilities

  • ☐ Long-term care facilities
  • ☐ Local hospitals
  • ☐ Tertiary care hospitals

Physicians

  • ☐ Primary care
  • ☐ Cardiologists
  • ☐ Internal medicine
  • ☐ Geriatricians
  • ☐ Nephrologists
  • ☐ Palliative care specialists

Click here for a printable version of this checklist