Heart failure: Improving your heart function and quality of life

Heart failure can wear you down, making it hard to travel. For convenient checkups and follow-up care, we offer heart failure outreach clinics at four locations in Wisconsin and one in Illinois.

Our heart failure team offers advanced treatments at University Hospital in Madison, one of the nation’s top-ranked heart hospitals.

We offer the state’s most active heart transplant program. Our transplant wait times are among the shortest in the country. Also, we are the only program in Wisconsin to offer minimally invasive ventricular assist device (VAD) implantation.

A physician will do many tests to determine if you have heart failure and to what extent your heart is failing. Those tests could include a physical exam, and electrocardiogram (ECG or EKG), and ultrasound of the heart (echocardiogram), blood tests, chest x-rays and a stress test.

Heart failure is a serious condition and there is no cure, but it is possible to manage your condition. A doctor will work with you to determine if your heart disease requires changes in your diet and exercise routine, medications and/or surgery.

Without treatment, your heart will continue to fail. If you’ve been diagnosed with advanced heart disease and/or heart failure, you will need help to improve your heart function and improve your quality of life.

We are a Center of Excellence for most insurance networks. We are a Veteran’s administration approved center for destination therapy LVAD and heart transplantation. Please check with your insurance provider to make sure you have coverage.

For convenient checkups and follow-up care, we offer heart failure outreach clinics in Green Bay, Madison, Marshfield, Stevens Point, and Wausau, WI; and Rockford, IL.

U.S. News & World Report recently ranked UW Health University Hospital as the number one hospital in Wisconsin. Our cardiology and heart surgery team ranked as high performing.

For patients with congestive heart failure, our heart failure specialists may recommend implanting a device that remotely monitors changes in a patient’s pulmonary artery (PA) pressure. The device use is called CardioMEMS — a wireless monitoring system that is implanted through a catheter-based procedure performed by an electrophysiologist. No open-heart surgery is needed.

Once the CardioMEMS device is implanted, your cardiologist can see your PA pressure numbers each day without an in-person appointment. Using this device has been proven to reduce the number of hospitalizations because your cardiologist can take proactive steps to change a patient’s medical therapy before heart failure symptoms appear.

Talk to your cardiologist or primary care provider if you feel you may benefit from this type of implanted device.

If you have severe heart failure, your doctor may recommend a heart transplant. During a heart transplant, surgeons remove your heart and replace it with a donor heart. Our program also provides patients with options for dual organ transplants such as heart-kidney, heart-liver or heart-lung transplants.

VADs are machines that help the heart pump blood. Most often, a VAD is implanted to keep your heart working as you await a heart transplant. VADs are also offered to patients who don’t qualify for a heart transplant.

Your heart’s valves move blood into and out of your heart. When a heart valve is damaged or diseased, it doesn’t open or close properly. This is called a valve disorder. Valve disorders can lead to heart failure. The most common heart valve disorder is mitral regurgitation. Our team offers mitral valve repair and replacement, including the minimally invasive MitraClip procedure. Interventional cardiologists use a catheter tube to guide a small clip to your mitral valve. The clip helps your mitral valve to close.

These are rare diseases caused by an abnormal type of protein that deposits in the heart. We offer a comprehensive treatment program ranging from medical therapy to heart transplant.

We care for all patients with Advanced Pulmonary Hypertension whether their condition is related to or unrelated to heart disease.

Advanced imaging such as cardiac MRIs and PET scans help monitor treatment which may range from  medical therapy to heart transplantation.

Your heart’s electrical system keeps your heart beating at the right pace. When the electrical system stops working, your heart begins to beat irregularly. An irregular heartbeat is called an arrhythmia. Untreated arrhythmias can lead to heart failure. At UW Health, we offer cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) to treat heart arrhythmias. CRT can prevent or reduce symptoms of heart failure. During CRT, surgeons implant a pacemaker under your skin. Wires connect the pacemaker to your heart. The wires deliver electrical signals to reset your heart’s rhythm as needed.

Patients can be monitored with implantation of a PA sensor device called “CardioMEMS” to monitor pressures and avoid hospitalizations related to overt heart failure. 

Our experts in palliative care support patients and families to help relieve patients' symptoms and improve their quality of life.