Are Non-participants of Conventional Centre-based Cardiac Rehabilitation Willing to Participate in Cardiac Telerehabilitation?

Cardiac rehabilitation (CR) is indicated in patients with a wide range of cardiovascular diseases. Its benefits are well-studied and participation in CR is thus stated as a Class IA recommendation in the 2016 European Guidelines on cardiovascular disease prevention in clinical practice. It is known however that participation rates are low. This is due to multiple factors such as health system barriers (e.g. lack of referral by doctors), as well as patient factors (eg. travelling time to hospital).

Telerehabilitation is a modality of cardiac rehabilitation that is widely studied to overcome barriers in conventional cardiac rehabilitation. Most studies about telerehabilitation screen for potential rehabilitation candidates, ask which patients are prepared to start centre-based rehabilitation and then start randomisation for centre-based or home-based rehabilitation.

The hypothesis is that by offering a home-based alternative for centre-based rehabilitation, patient participation rates will go up. However, this hypothesis has not been investigated.

The willingness to participate in patients that refuse centre-based rehabilitation is thus scarcely studied.

This study aims to assess the willingness to participate in telerehabilitation in patients that refuse conventional centre-based rehabilitation as well as the main reasons not to participate in centre-based rehabilitation.