Bringing World-Class Heart Failure Care to Every West Virginia Community

In West Virginia's most rural counties, residents can expect to live up to 12 years less than their neighbors in areas with better healthcare access. This stark reality drives everything we do at the WVU Heart and Vascular Institute.  

West Virginia leads the nation in cardiovascular disease prevalence at 15 percent with heart disease mortality 19 percent above the national average. Our rural residents face a 19 percent higher risk of developing heart failure.   

Behind each statistic is a real person — a coal miner in McDowell County, a grandmother in Pocahontas County, a teacher in Webster County — who deserves the same quality care available at our academic medical center.  

Expanding Access Through Innovation  

With 25 hospitals across our system spanning West Virginia and surrounding states, we've been working to bring specialized heart failure expertise to communities that historically lacked access to advanced cardiac care.   

The challenge isn't just geographic distance. It's about overcoming workforce shortages and systemic healthcare inequities that have plagued rural America for decades.  

Telemedicine has become essential to our approach. We're connecting community hospitals across our system directly with our board-certified heart failure cardiologists, allowing patients to receive specialized consultation without traveling hours from home.   

A patient hospitalized with decompensated heart failure at a rural community hospital can now have their case reviewed by our specialists in real-time, with treatment plans optimized before discharge. This isn't future thinking. It's happening now across our network.  

We're also developing regional heart failure hubs that will serve as coordinated care centers, bringing together specialized providers and connecting them via telemedicine to our full cardiovascular team. It's early work, but we believe this model can transform how rural patients access ongoing heart failure management.  

Remote Monitoring Shows Real Promise  

Pilot studies using remote patient monitoring have shown up to 57 percent reduction in heart failure hospitalizations. We're studying how to implement this across our system, using FDA-approved devices that let patients send daily weights, blood pressures, and symptoms directly to care teams who can intervene before problems escalate.  

For someone living far from the nearest hospital, this technology changes everything. Medication adjustments happen over the phone instead of requiring long trips. Warning signs get caught early. Patients tell us they feel more connected to their care team despite the physical distance.  

Training Community Pharmacists as Care Partners  

One of our most promising initiatives came from partnering with the WVU School of Pharmacy to create a Heart Failure Certificate Program for community pharmacists. We piloted this program, and the results have been encouraging enough that we're planning to expand it across the state.  

Here's why this matters: over 40 percent of West Virginia counties don't have a cardiologist. In these communities, the local pharmacist is often the most accessible healthcare professional. They see patients more frequently than physicians do. They're trusted members of the community. But traditionally, they haven't had specialized training in complex heart failure medication management.  

Our certificate program changes that. Pharmacists learn guideline-directed medical therapy, medication optimization techniques, and how to recognize early decompensation signs. They can then work collaboratively with primary care providers and our heart failure specialists to adjust medications, provide education, and coordinate care.  

By training pharmacists throughout the state, we're extending specialist-level heart failure care through trusted local providers who already have relationships with these patients. This approach can significantly reduce the need for patients to travel long distances for routine heart failure management.  

Supporting Rural Physicians  

We know rural primary care providers carry enormous responsibility managing complex patients with limited specialist support.   

We've been committed to education through didactic lecture series with residency programs across the state and through Project ECHO® — a collaborative initiative with the West Virginia Clinical and Translational Science Institute and the WVU Heart and Vascular Institute. This program connects rural clinicians with our specialists for case-based learning and real-time consultation.  

We're planning to significantly expand these educational efforts to reach more primary care physicians and advanced practice providers throughout West Virginia.   

By building on our existing programs and broadening their reach, we can help ensure that providers across the state have access to the specialized knowledge and support they need when managing complex heart failure cases.  

The Work Ahead  

Geography shouldn't determine how long you live or whether you get good healthcare. That's not a radical idea. It's basic fairness. But making it reality requires sustained effort, creative thinking, and willingness to try new approaches. 

Our planned expansion over the coming year will test whether we can scale what's worked in pilot programs. The pharmacy certificate program's statewide rollout will create a network of heart failure-trained pharmacists throughout underserved areas. Our telemedicine connections will reach more community hospitals. And we're pursuing federal funding to accelerate this work.  

The future of rural healthcare means bringing expertise to patients, wherever they live. At the WVU Heart and Vascular Institute, we're committed to building that future across West Virginia.