Interpreting the Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire in Clinical Trials and Clinical Care

To improve the patient-centeredness of care, patient-reported outcomes have been increasingly used to quantify patients' symptoms, function, and quality of life. In heart failure, the Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire (KCCQ) has been qualified by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as a Clinical Outcome Assessment and recommended as a performance measure for quantifying the quality of care. By systematically asking the same questions reproducibly over time, the KCCQ can validly and sensitively capture the impact of heart failure on patients' lives and is strongly associated with clinical events over time. This review describes how to interpret the KCCQ, how it should be analyzed in clinical trials to maximize the interpretability of results, and how it can be used in clinical practice and population health. By providing a deeper understanding of the KCCQ, it is hoped that its use can further improve the patient-centeredness of heart failure care.