Get With the Guidelines–Heart Failure (GWTG-HF) Registry

Owned by Damon Seils
Last updated: Jun 07, 2023 by Katie Arnold
2 min read

Description

Get With the Guidelines-Heart Failure (GWTG-HF) is a registry from the American Heart Association that includes data on hospital admissions for heart failure from many hospitals throughout the U.S. 

Get With The Guidelines® - Heart Failure | American Heart Association

HF-Full-CRF-Updated-December-2022_updated-April-23.pdf (heart.org)


DataShare has a method for linking the GWTG-HF data to Medicare 100% inpatient claims using indirect identifiers, originally developed by Brad Hammill. See this paper for details

Linking Inpatient Clinical Registry Data to Medicare Claims Data Using Indirect Identifiers - PMC (nih.gov).

Key Considerations

  • Records in the GWTG-HF data are at the individual inpatient hospital admission level, not the person level. Patients with multiple hospitalizations may have multiple records, but there is not a consistent person-level ID that can be used to identify group records by person.
  • Registry data are provided in "harvests". Each harvest has its own unique registry record ID numbers and cannot be linked/merged with data from other harvests.  
  • By linking the GWTG-HF registry data to Medicare claims, we can link the admission-level data in GWTG-HF to inpatient claims and then identify individuals at the patient-level. To obtain other Medicare data for those patients, we produce a finder file containing the BENE_IDs (beneficiary IDs) that we have identified in the linking process.
  • There is ~3-6 month lag between admissions and when the data are available. This lag should be considered when defining the study period for a project. 
  • Projects needing the most recently available data may consider using the CMS VRDC to work with quarterly Medicare claims data, rather than the annual data that DataShare curates.
  • GWTG-HF is also a program to incentivize hospitals to follow the AHA guidelines. Some questions in the registry are tied to the incentives, while others are not. Questions that are not tied to incentives are more likely to the missing.

Governance

GWTG-HF data are collected by IQVIA and processed by DCRI. When a project is approved to get the GWTG-HF data, a programmer at DCRI (Vladimir Demyanenko currently) will provide a copy of the latest "harvest" of the registry data. Harvests are produced on a periodic basis, though the intervals have changed over the years. 

Projects involving GWTG-HF data must be approved the American Heart Association with a data usage agreement and a substantial data fee must be paid.

Cell Size Suppression Requirements

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