Key result
Virtual cardiac rehabilitation requires standardized quality frameworks to ensure equitable access and clinical effectiveness.
Why the study?
Despite clinical benefits, cardiac rehabilitation participation remains suboptimal, prompting virtual models that require robust quality standards to ensure effectiveness and safety.
Establishing a standardized quality framework tailored to digital settings is critical to ensure equitable access, clinical effectiveness, and sustainable delivery of virtual cardiac rehabilitation services.
Requires caution scaling virtual cardiac rehabilitation without standards; extends national frameworks but leaves open prospective validation.
Cardiac rehabilitation (CR) is a comprehensive, multidisciplinary program essential for the secondary prevention of cardiovascular disease. Despite its clinical benefits, participation in CR remains suboptimal due to barriers such as limited accessibility, time constraints, socioeconomic challenges, and structural inequities. In response, virtual and remote CR models have gained attention, accelerated by the advancement of digital health technologies and the COVID-19 pandemic. To ensure the effectiveness and safety of these alternative models, robust quality standards and indicators are crucial. This review examines national CR quality management frameworks in the UK, USA, Australia, and Canada. These countries have developed standardized core components and multidimensional quality indicators at the system, program, and patient levels. Based on these, the review explores how existing quality frameworks can be adapted to virtual CR models, where additional considerations such as patient eligibility, digital platform certification, real-time monitoring, data privacy, and interoperability are needed. In addition, other factors for successful implementation of virtual CR include personalized care, user-friendly technology, Artificial intelligence (AI)-driven data management, and supportive health policies including reimbursement systems. Establishing a standardized quality framework tailored to digital settings will be critical to ensure equitable access, clinical effectiveness, and sustainable delivery of virtual CR services.
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Bo Ryun Kim (2025) conducted a review in Cardiovascular disease. Virtual cardiac rehabilitation was evaluated. Establishing a standardized quality framework tailored to digital settings is critical to ensure equitable access, clinical effectiveness, and sustainable delivery of virtual cardiac rehabilitation.
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