Expected Impact
Despite strong evidence on the effectiveness of cardiac rehabilitation (CR) in secondary prevention, program implementation and referral rates across Europe are still low and patients’ nonadherence to central CR components over the continuum of the disease limit long-term benefits. In particular, patients with low health literacy, advanced age or multiple comorbidities often display high nonadherence rates to CR programs, with related need for a targeted intervention. In TIMELY, patient motivation, self-efficacy, and engagement leading to activation are considered the most important predictors of long-lasting lifestyle changes. Thus, improvement of patient activation and health literacy are central outcomes of the TIMELY intervention which will be assessed in a multicenter randomized controlled trial.
In TIMELY, secondary prevention will be supported using an AI eHealth platform to enhance long-term benefits of cardiac rehabilitation (CR). The guideline-based TIMELY components aim to identify optimal times for coordinated and tailored interventions, considering medical treatment, structured exercise, lifestyle modification, and psychosocial impact. Integrating repeated AI-based assessments of psychosocial risk factors, TIMELY will offer solutions to overcome individual barriers. TIMELY will help manage cardiovascular risk factors, improve cardiopulmonary fitness, support a healthy lifestyle, and enhance quality of life. It has the potential to reduce coronary artery disease's impact on healthcare by lowering recurrent events and hospital readmissions, promoting clinician collaboration, and reducing societal burdens by lowering comorbidity rates and improving healthcare resource management, productivity, and workability.
TIMELY aims to further reduce cardiovascular morbidity and mortality by increasing overall CR uptake and by fully integrating CR-based secondary prevention. Despite a class IA indication in clinical guidelines, integration, referral, and uptake of CR remains low in Europe. Integration of the patients’ perspective and tailoring of the programs based on patients’ preference is one of the cornerstones of the TIMELY program and may help to increase uptake. Reduced cost for health care providers may allow to provide incentives to cardiologists for prescribing long-term CR programs. By 2024, TIMELY can be a certified eHealth solution for CR, i.e. a novel care pathway for patients with CAD.
TIMELY aligns with the Communication on Digital Transformation of Health and Care in the Digital Single Market priorities: TIMELY will enable citizens to access their health data across the EU through their personal portal and apps in which the important information related to their disease will be available also across borders. The TIMELYnet platform will promote collaborative research by enabling researchers and other professionals to pool resources (data, expertise, intelligent analytics and storage capacities) across the EU and increase their knowledge on the effects of CR in the long term. TIMELY provides the digital tools to empower people to take care of their health, identify risks early enough to react, stimulate prevention and enable communication, feedback and interaction between patients and caregivers and healthcare providers.
TIMELY holds potential to lower the direct impact of coronary artery disease (CAD) on the health care system by reducing recurrent events and hospital readmission rates and will provide a platform for efficient collaboration between clinicians. TIMELY may reduce the burden to the wider society through lowering of comorbidity rates and better management of healthcare resources as well as by increasing productivity and workability.
