Heart Failure National Trends in Heart Failure Hospitalization After Acute Myocardial Infarction for Medicare Beneficiaries 1998–2010 Jersey Chen, MD, MPH; Angela Fu-Chi Hsieh, PhD; Kumar Dharmarajan, MD, MBA; Frederick A. Masoudi, MD, MSPH; Harlan M. Krumholz, MD, SM Background—Previous studies have reported conflicting findings regarding how the incidence of heart failure (HF) after acute myocardial infarction (AMI) has changed over time, and data on contemporary national trends are sparse. Methods and Results—Using a complete national sample of 2 789 943 AMI hospitalizations of Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries from 1998 through 2010, we evaluated annual changes in the incidence of subsequent HF hospitalization and mortality using Poisson and survival analysis models. The number of patients hospitalized for HF within 1 year after AMI declined modestly from 16.1 per 100 person-years in 1998 to 14.2 per 100 person years in 2010 (P