Study of CardioMEMS in heart failure patients: Study confirms benefit in costs and quality‐adjusted life years, but does not measure quality‐adjusted life years

Abstract

The study by Codina et al. 1 is a single-centre study of 43 consecutive patients with heart failure who underwent implantation of the CardioMEMS device. The objective of this study was to evaluate the costs and outcomes determined by CardioMEMS; this information was examined both at 1 year and at 2 years after implantation. From previous literature, CardioMEMS is known to determine two favourable outcomes: a reduction in hospitalization rate and a benefit in terms of quality-adjusted life year (QALYs). In the Codina study, cost information was accurately determined and was therefore the main finding of the study. On the other hand, QALYs were not measured in these patients, so the most obvious consequence would have been that QALYs could not be included in the favourable results generated by CardioMEMS. In fact, the authors first collected the QALY benefit previously reported in other studies published in the literature and then arbitrarily assigned these QALYs to their 43 patients, despite the obvious differences that distinguish the previous patients from the 43 enrolled in the Spanish study. In our opinion, because quality of life was not measured in these patients, this study needs to present its results in a different format, including only the outcomes that were actually measured and excluding the outcomes expressed as QALYs.