Rapid evaluation of the Managing Heart Failure @home programme

Illustration by ArtemisDiana/Adobe Stock

What is the issue?

Heart failure has significant impacts on both the healthcare system and patient outcomes. The Managing Heart Failure @home (MHF@home) programme was developed by NHS England in 2022 to try help improve heart failure management and population outcomes, to reduce hospital admissions and readmissions, and to improve quality of life for people living with heart failure. The MHF@home programme is composed of three core elements: a personalised care approach, remote support and monitoring, and integrated care. The activities within these three elements are linked, and together aim to enable programme participants to better manage their conditions and prevent deterioration. The initial pilot, started in 2023/2024, has continued in some of the sites in 2024/2025 and is newly implemented in others.

How are we helping?

DECIDE (Digitally Enabled Care in Diverse Environments) is a new centre for rapid evaluation of technology-enabled remote monitoring in health and care, funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research Health and Social Care Delivery Research (NIHR HSDR). DECIDE is a partnership between the University of Oxford and RAND Europe.

The DECIDE centre is conducting rapid scoping phase of an evaluation of MHF@home programme. This scoping phase will assess the feasibility of conducting a full evaluation of the MHF@home programme, and would help inform the design of such evaluation. A full evaluation would aim to evaluate how the MHF@home programme unfolded, its outputs and impacts, and influences on its performance. Our scoping phase evaluation activities are focused on learning from the seven pilot sites that have continued with the MHF@home programme in 2024/2025.

The aims of the evaluation activities are twofold:

• To understand data collection and the availability of data that would be needed to assess the impact of the MHF@home programme on patient reported outcomes and healthcare resource use; and
• To begin to identify the diversity of implementation approaches across MHF@home sites, including considerations of equity and inclusion, in order to inform the design of a full evaluation of the MHF@home programme post-pilot phase. This evaluation would further examine and learn from implementation processes and influences on them.

The activities of the scoping phase will take a multi-site, qualitative approach, facilitated by the MHF@home team of NHS England as our policy customer.

Our core methods include semi-structured interviews and document review. We will conduct interviews with representatives from each of the seven continuing pilot sites as well as with a member of the NHS England MHF@home team. We will also analyse key documents from each site on their heart failure management care pathway and MHF@Home programme documents.

Collaborators at University of Oxford