Lead: Professor Steve Nicholls
Coronary rehabilitation (CR) clinicians, policy makers and researchers from primary and secondary care come together in this project and successfully developed a cardiac rehabilitation monitoring system. By mapping the outcomes of South Australian country and metropolitan patients attending CR, the group developed a set of quality indicators to measure the effectiveness of CR programs.
They also built a state-wide data linkage program to measure the outcomes of patients who are referred to cardiac rehabilitation programs across the state. The CR monitoring system is currently being integrated into the SA Health Acute Coronary Syndrome dashboard and will enable the continuous improvement of CR programs to better meet the needs of heart patients.
The collaborative approach to evidence-based service design was valued by the project group and there is interest in expanding this collaboration to form a quality collaborative of CR clinicians and consumers to continue to design solutions to improve CR programs.
The group also hosted a National Forum at which taskforce was established to progress the development of a national set of CR quality indicators.