LAUSR

Heart failure (HF) is an increasingly prevalent cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide, with an estimated 26 million people affected.1 Care for patients with HF is estimated to cost $108 billion annually worldwide.2 In the United States (US), measures to improve care of patients with HF have been introduced from more than a decade ago that target not only quality of healthcare delivery, but also cost reduction for patients with HF. Quality of care for HF is publicly reported among the nation’s hospitals and registries, such as the American Heart Association’s Get With the Guidelines programme that provides feedback for process measures and outcomes to participating hospitals.3 Similar measures have been reported from the United Kingdom and other countries.4 Heart failure has now also been widely recognized as an epidemic afflicting developing countries like China. More than 4 million individuals in China are reported to have HF, and 500 000 new cases are diagnosed every year.5,6 In the face of this growing epidemic, the Chinese government has emphasized improvement in HF care as a priority in the past decade. The Chinese Hospital Association included HF as one of the target diseases for quality improvement and established a panel of HF-specific quality measures to characterize hospital performance.7 Moreover, the State Council in China has initiated extensive healthcare reform leading to much improved access to care with near universal health coverage for inpatient treatment in recent years. Despite these efforts, information pertaining to adherence to guideline-recommended therapy and outcomes for patients hospitalized with HF in China has been scarce. In this issue of the Journal, Li et al.8 describe the methods and baseline characteristics of HERO, a Heart Failure Registry of Patient Outcomes study, designed to address the lack of clinical