Patent ID: 6980851

Claim:
A method for delivering pacing therapy to a heart failure patient, comprising: operating an implantable cardiac rhythm management device that generates sensing signals from sensed cardiac activity and delivering cardiac pacing therapy through one or more pacing channels to one or more heart chambers; computing a clinical state vector as a combination of a plurality of parameters related to a patient's heart failure status, wherein the plurality of parameters define an n-dimensional vector space with n being the number of parameters and with each parameter mapped to an ordinal scale that represents a coordinate axis in the n-dimensional vector space, and further wherein the n parameters include at least one parameter derived from a sense signal; and, computing a difference vector between the computed clinical state vector and a previously computed state vector, wherein the magnitude of the difference vector indicates the extent of change in the patient's heart failure status and the direction of the difference vector indicates whether the patient's heart failure status is improving or worsening.