A substantial number of heart failure patients undergoing implantation of implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs) fail to receive beta-blockers, or receive them at a suboptimal dose. Remote monitoring (RM) is becoming the standard means of following up recipients of ICDs. However, the impact of this shift toward remote ICD follow-up on the quality of drug therapy management in current clinical practice is unknown. The present analysis was aimed at investigating the impact of RM on the dose of beta-blockers achieved, and its association with clinical outcome at 12 months.

Altogether 987 consecutive patients were enrolled and followed up for at least 12 months in 25 Italian centres. RM was adopted by 499 patients.

The number of patients receiving beta-blockers at any dose decreased after 12 months (from 403 (81%) to 370 (74%) for the remote arm and from 389 (80%) to 342 (70%) for the standard arm, both p < 0.02). Nonetheless, the number of patients on beta-blockers at the effective dose increased in both arms (from 60 (12%) to 82 (16%) for remote and from 63 (13%) to 98 (20%) for standard arms respectively, both p < 0.05). At multivariate analysis, RM was not associated with an effective dose of beta-blockers at the follow-up evaluation. However, the adoption of RM (p = 0.003) and the achievement of the effective dose of beta-blockers (p = 0.006) were independently and positively associated with an improved outcome.

In a ‘real-world’ setting, we did not find an association between RM and the achieved dose of beta-blockers. However, we reported outcome benefits in achieving the effective dose of beta-blockers during follow-up and in adopting RM.