Regulatory Relationships of Demographic, Clinical Characteristics and Quality of Care for Heart Failure Patients in Southern China

Background Quality of care for Chinese patients with heart failure was substandard. It is of utmost value to ascertain the characteristics related to quality of care to narrow the gap. Methods Data from 2,064 heart failure patients between 1 January 2012 and 31 December 2015 at a hospital in Fujian Province were analyzed. Bayesian Network was used to assess the regulatory relationships between demographic, clinical characteristics and compliance with quality indicators. Results The compliance with quality indicators ranged from 42.5% to 90.2%. The compliance with recommended doses for medications all reached or was close to 100% except indapamide. In Bayesian network, residence place, hypertension, troponin, B-type natriuretic peptide, heart rate, lung disease, number of emergency treatment, ejection fraction directly regulated the compliance and gender, age, medical payment method, myocardiopathy, coronary heart disease, arrhythmia had indirectly effect. The lower compliance was found in patients under emergency treatment, patients with abnormal testing indicators, patients without specific comorbidities and patients with NRCMS or self-paying. Patients with lung disease and those who lived in urban area had longer length of stay. Conclusions The compliance with medication indicators for heart failure were suboptimal, but recommended doses were prescribed in patients who received medications. A series of strategies should be developed to improve the quality of care, such as expanding the scope and depth of knowledge of guidelines and clinical pathway, integrating the reminder and quality assessment model into hospital medical record information system, paying more attention to vulnerable population and improving the medical security system.