Heart Failure
Make an Appointment
For the Charlottesville area:
For Northern Virginia:
Learning you or a loved one has heart failure can feel overwhelming. It is a serious condition, but at UVA Health, you have a team of experts ready to help you feel better and live a more active life.
Why Choose UVA Health for Heart Failure Care?
At UVA Health, we offer complete care for heart failure. That means everything you need is in one place.
- Recognized heart failure care: We've received recognition from the American Heart Association for our heart failure. See our other heart care awards.
- Experts and advanced care: We are one of the few hospitals in the country that offers every level of care, from basic medicine to the most complex heart procedures. In addition to your heart doctor, you'll have access to surgeons, lung doctors, kidney specialists, and nurses who specialize only in heart failure.
- Care close to home: We know travel can be hard. We work together with your local doctors so you can get blood work, sleep studies, and echocardiograms and other testing near your home.
- Easy appointments: We do our best to coordinate your appointments on the same day to make your care as convenient as possible. If you have a device implant, you can see the device team the same day you see the heart failure team. That means fewer trips for appointments.
And if you need to be in the hospital, we have a unit with dedicated heart failure nurses.
Heart Failure Treatment
Our heart failure program offers the full range of treatment options. Our goal is to find the right plan for you.
Lifestyle and Medicine
The first steps often include:
- Diet and nutrition: Learning how to limit salt and fluids to keep your heart from working too hard.
- Medications: Using "water pills" (diuretics) to remove extra fluid and other medicines that make it easier for your heart to pump blood.
- Diuresis clinic: If your fluid pills at home aren't working well enough, you can visit our clinic to receive medicine through an IV. This helps you get rid of extra fluid quickly and often prevents a stay in the hospital.
Treating Heart Failure With Devices
If medicine isn't enough, we use special devices to help your heart beat correctly:.
- Pacemakers: Small devices that help the heart beat in a steady rhythm.
- Implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs): Battery-powered devices that use electrical pulses to keep your heart working correctly.
- Cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT): A special pacemaker that makes sure both sides of your heart pump together at the exact same time.
Heart Failure Treatment at UVA Health
James Bergin, MD, discusses heart failure and the treatments available at UVA Health.
The majority of heart failure patients experience fatigue and shortness of breath. They may also develop other signs or symptoms such as bloating in the abdomen or swelling in the feet. They may also have troubles such as filling up quickly when they start to eat. That's called early satiety.
All of those would speak to congestion of the abdominal organs. What we commonly see are patients who think they're fine. They're just coughing, they're a little bit more short of breath. They think that they have a pneumonia or something. They see a physician. They put them on antibiotics, and it just doesn't clear.
And then eventually, someone ends up doing some sort of heart study like an Echo or something, and that's when they determine that all along, the whole cause of this has been not the lungs, but it's the heart. So the first things we like to cover in treatment options would be to instruct the patients as far as salt and fluid intake. Because that can have a big impact.
The next treatment option usually is trying to control the amount of fluid in the system and such using a diuretic. So a fluid pill to get rid of extra fluid. And then putting them on therapies to make it easier for the heart to eject the blood. So these are all the standard medical regimens that we use. The next step up is, if someone's having continued symptoms despite all of those therapies, then we start talking about heart pumps.
So assist pumps. And these are usually durable pumps that people-- you would put in with surgery, and they would be up walking around and living long term with. I think people should come to UVA because we have the unique ability to really provide all aspects of care. Once you step in, we're able to cover it all.
You don't have to go next door to some other clinic. You don't have to go down the street to a different hospital or see other physicians. We can really offer everything right here. So it's the cardiologist, the cardiovascular surgeons. It's the lung doctors who are involved with the care compliment us in clinic. We have the GI doctors, the blood doctors.
Everyone is right here at all phases. We offer transplantation of all organs. So very few hospitals in the region, in the area, or in the United States are able to offer all levels of care at all sites.
Heart Monitors and Nervous System Modulation
We use the latest technology to watch your heart and improve how it functions.
- CardioMEMS: This is a tiny, wireless sensor that measures the pressure in your heart. It sends info to your doctor so we can catch problems before they become serious. This helps you stay out of the hospital.
- Barostim therapy: This "neuromodulation" technology is a small device implanted under the skin that sends electrical pulses to the nerves that control your heart. This tells your brain to relax the blood vessels and slow the heart rate, which helps improve your symptoms.
Heart Pumps and Transplants
For patients who need more help, we offer advanced surgical options.
- Left ventricular assist device (LVAD): These are mechanical pumps that help your heart move blood through your body. They can give you more energy and help you feel much better. If a heart transplant isn't an option, a permanent heart pump can help you keep living your life.
- Heart transplant: Replacing a failing heart with a healthy donor heart.
- Temporary support: We also use tools like extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) or temporary mechanical heart pumps to stabilize your heart while you are in the hospital.
Heart Failure Patient Education Resources
June 5, 2026
01127 Spanish - Heart Failure Medications Overview
Document Description: Updated version coming soon! This is a comprehensive list in Spanish of common medications prescribed for heart failure patients.
June 5, 2026
01127 - Heart Failure Medications Overview
Document Description: This is a comprehensive list of common medications prescribed for heart failure patients.