Impact of Heart Disease among Black Americans on Quality of Care, Patient Safety, and Costs to the System and Individual

Heart disease is a healthcare issue of concern in the United States today. There are higher prevalence and mortality rates among the Black American population related to heart disease than in other racial groups (American Heart Association, 2022). During my practicum, I have noticed that heart disease significantly impacts the quality of the care patients receive and that heart disease compromises patient safety. I have also noticed high care costs for people with heart disease. For instance, a patient I was assigned to during my practicum had been diagnosed and admitted with coronary artery disease. Later, the patient was diagnosed with prediabetes and clinical depression. He needed to be attended to by different care professionals to manage his health conditions. This led to the patient spending more to meet the care costs needed to manage the comorbid conditions. Additionally, there was a case where a patient had taken the wrong medications, citing “confusion over having to take so many medications.” Besides this, I also noted that the billings sent to Medicaid and Medicare for covered patients were slightly higher than those without heart disease.

The available evidence is consistent with my observations of how heart disease affects the quality of care and safety of the patient. Heart disease impacts the quality of care, the safety of patients, and the costs of care as it is a factor for patients developing other diseases. Depression and cardiovascular are common comorbid in patients diagnosed with type 2 diabetes (Inoue et al., 2020). Additionally, research shows an increased risk of cardiac mortality in people with comorbid depression and diabetes (Farooqi et al., 2019). Having heart disease and other comorbidities can negatively impact the quality and safety of the care patients receive. Comorbidity in heart disease requires using multiple medications for both heart disease and other diseases, which is a risk for medication administration errors that impact the quality and safety of the patient. Besides these, the medications for managing and treating heart disease and other comorbid diseases have side effects and can lead to adverse outcomes that threaten patient safety, which can further influence adherence to the prescribed medications (Easthall et al., 2019).

Research evidence also supports the observations related to the increase in care costs in heart disease patients with comorbid diseases such as depression and diabetes. The cost of treating two or more diseases is higher than treating one. From a general disease perspective, a research study in New Zealand showed that having more than one non-communicable disease increased the burden of disease and contributed to higher health system costs (Blakely et al., 2019). Another study by Nichols et al. (2020)focused on comparing expenditures for managing chronic kidney disease (CKD) in patients with and without comorbid diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and heart failure. Nichols et al. (2020) found that comorbidities increased the costs of care for CKD by 31 percent, as well as the rate of hospitalizations and costs associated with hospitalizations by 61 percent as compared to people without comorbidities (Nichols et al., 2020).