Sweden has a long tradition of measuring results and performance of the given health care and tries to find explanations for the discrepancies between different regions/hospitals/primary care units in order to stimulate to achieve better results. In recent years, quality registries have become an increasingly important source of Swedish clinical research.

The Swedish Heart Failure registry (S-HFR or RiksSvikt) was created in order to give the participating units knowledge about how they diagnosed and treated their patients and to obtain indications where further efforts were needed in order to give patients with heart failure an optimal management.

S-HFR is an Internet-based registry, where participating units on-line can register their HF-patients or transfer data from standardized forms or from computerized patients documentations

Despite the fact that detailed and updated guidelines are regularly published on how to diagnose and treat patients with Heart Failure (HF), many patients do not fulfil the diagnostic criteria and are not treated with recommended drugs and if so not in dosages used in the large controlled studies. The most common symptoms of Heart Failure are shortness of breath and fatigue. To verify the diagnosis, an objective evaluation of cardiac function is needed, usually performed by help of echocardiography.