It is not known whether subspecialty care by cardiologists improves outcomes in heart failure patients from the community over care by other physicians.
Using administrative data, we monitored 38 702 consecutive patients with first-time hospitalization for heart failure in Ontario, Canada, between April 1994 and March 1996 and examined differences in processes of care and clinical outcomes between patients attended by physicians of different disciplines. We found that patients attended by cardiologists had lower 1-year risk-adjusted mortality than those attended by general internists, family practitioners, and other physicians (28.5% versus 31.7%, 34.9%, and 35.9%, respectively; all pairwise comparisons, P